…is a much better blog title than “Plans for the Upper Queen Street Bridge”!
Some good news for cyclists (and citybound pedestrians), as NZTA and AT/AC are racing to sort out the designs for Upper Queen Street Bridge ahead of the planned September (!) opening of the Grafton Gully Cycleway.
The bigger Auckland Council plans for an urban “gateway” artwork above/over the bridge won’t be in place by September, and may take a year or two yet. But there will be big changes coming over the next few months – and, rarely seen yet in Auckland transport history, this will include significant new space being provided for pedestrians and cyclists from what was previously car space.
Yes, you read that right. The bridge will go from 6 traffic lanes to 5 traffic lanes and from 1 parking lane (why have car parking on a bridge???) to 0 parking lanes (yes, that sounds better). That will free up space to get 5m wide shared paths either side. That is pretty generous – for context, that is wider than the whole Wynyard Crossing bridge between Te Wero and North Wharf – but on both sides of the road, not just once!
As cyclists will travel along these paths in many directions (3 different routes to come/go to on the north, and 3 to come/go to from the south, plus some extra options if you include those where riders have a choice between on-road and off-road), the decision was made by NZTA / AT not to go with physically separated paths. Instead, it is likely that there will be with some surface treatment (like a thin band of pavers along the middle) dividing the official pedestrian from the official cyclist side, without barriers or kerbs “fencing you in”.
While we are somewhat sad not to get Copenhagen lanes on the bridge, we understand the logic – and from personal experience, on a bridge, such a shared path works pretty well, as pedestrians are much less likely to meander (unlike for example on Tamaki Drive, where parked cars and shops and houses on the other side of the road cause constant “cross traffic” over the shared path).
CAA will keep involved with the design process, in particular to make sure it is easy to connect to the bridge paths from either end, and to ensure that future links (such as a cycleway on the northern Ian McKinnon side to Nelson Street off-ramp via Canada Street) can be integrated.
