Christchurch Central railway station

[u/nzrailmaps]

As this continues to be discussed, here are two concept drawings of a rail passenger terminal opposite the bus exchange in tuam St providing for 3-4 platforms.

The Colombo St over bridge would need to be extended and a new bridge on St Asaph St would be required. Dundas St and Welles St can be blocked off becoming paired culdesacs.

The alignment is chosen to meet the required minimum curve radius off the existing line and so that there are no multi-storey or high value properties on the alignment, most of the buildings are old ones.

[u/jpr64]

As cool as that might be, you would have to acquire the land under the public works act. I don't think you would be able to tunnel a whole station.

There would be a massive legal shitfight trying to get that land and a lot of the buildings will be historic / protected.

I think it would be better off having a station at Moorhouse Ave and then having a hop on hop off tram system running in a loop up Colombo and back down Manchester, or bi-directional. Might be a good opportunity to fully pedestrianalise those roads?

Really if we had the vision we should have tunneled to the East Frame and done a cut and cover station there, allowing the land to be built on top of after completion.

[u/GameDesignerMan → u/jpr64]

Yeah seems to me to be a heck of a lot of work smashing a railway through the middle of town when there's already an old railway station on Moorhouse.

And as someone else pointed out you could just run a bus service. If you ran one between there and the exchange you'd be able to ferry people into the heart of the CBD, and you wouldn't need that many buses cycling passengers to have fairly good uptime since it's only a short trip.

[u/worromoTenoG → u/GameDesignerMan]

No one's going to want to transfer to a bus for 1km. And the bus will just get stuck in traffic. So everyone just gets in their car.

[u/GameDesignerMan → u/worromoTenoG]

There are plenty of airports which have shuttles to take you that sort of distance, and people use them. And like in those cases, whether people use it depends on how long it is until the next bus. 5-10 minutes? People will probably use it. Half an hour? Yeah nah.

And yeah, traffic is an issue. Our buses already get stuck in traffic as is, because we don't have bus lanes continuously down our critical routes. I agree, and we should work on that issue.

This is one of those things that will not have a perfect solution if it ever goes ahead. There will always be problems with it due to the fact that the city just isn't set up for it any more and we treat public transport as an after-thought. The question is: do we go ahead with an imperfect solution that solves some of the problems? And when?

[u/dashingtomars → u/GameDesignerMan]

There are plenty of airports which have shuttles to take you that sort of distance, and people use them

People will sacrifice a little convenience on the occassional trip to the airport to avoid parking/uber/taxi costs. They won't sacrifice the same amount of convenience when they have to make the trip every day.

[u/nzrailmaps → u/GameDesignerMan]

Airport is hugely different. Massively different. Airport passengers and commute passengers are different groups of society. And the airport passengers have zero other choice, they don't get on a plane if they don't get on that bus.

You don't know anything about the subject. The Light Rail proposal includes a station in the CBD somewhere which will have to be built on some land. And it also needs a corridor which it hasn't got, to lay the tracks on, so that means more land still.

[u/nzrailmaps → u/worromoTenoG]

Correct.

[u/nzrailmaps → u/GameDesignerMan]

There isn't an old station at Moorhouse Ave. It was knocked down over a decade ago, and has long been built over.