Golden Mile and Harbour Quays Second Spine

The current proposed design of the Golden Mile factors in the proposed additional public transport spine and work is already well advanced with a new road layout and bus stops designed for Courtenay Place with the new Harbour Quays bus route in mind. It's important to note that the current proposed plan for the golden mile will improve bus flow and bus capacity, but, given the narrow sections on Willis Street and the southern end of Lambton Quay, there is no way to increase capacity sufficiently without an additional parallel bus route through the central city.

Figures for these projects are indicative at this stage and reliant on the outcomes of a number of key decisions and processes, including the long-term plans of both councils and decisions from central government on major transport questions including congestion or time of use pricing for roads and investments in the State Highway around the Basin Reserve and Mt Victoria or, as recently suggested, a mega road tunnel linking the Beehive to the airport. 

With maximum capacity for bus operations on the Golden Mile imminent in 2025, the $57m indicative budget for the second spine provides an alternative route in and out of the city making use of the extensive road space on and closer to the Harbour Quays. While locations are not yet decided, this would ideally add bus stops serving the waterfront, Te Ngākau Civic Square, Tākina Convention Centre and Te Papa and ease bottlenecks and capacity constraints as more and more people use public transport. Bus lanes seem simple but there's a lot of work to sort out the road space, traffic lights, crossings and other public amenities. So there will be significant civil works focused on rapid improvements to traffic flows and congestion so that people can get across the city faster to key regional destinations like the hospital and airport. 

The second stage business case is part of the standard procedure that councils use. This investment fits with the Government's draft transport policy statement and we very much hope it will be supported by the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi. It’s imperative that any major transport, housing and urban development decisions are integrated in the planning beyond this investment and it’s envisaged this work would be integrated with any future plans for the State Highway around the Basin and Mt Victoria tunnel.

The $12m indicated for shelters and signs is shorthand for the complete range of bus stop infrastructure upgrades along the length of the Golden Mile. These are complex builds that have to consider wind and earthquake resilience among other technical aspects. The indicative budget includes the necessary foundation works, shelter fixtures, and the service and technological components needed for improved real time information, in stop displays and improved security features. Similar major bus hubs elsewhere in Wellington are in the same ballpark for costs, like the hospital and Kilbirnie hubs for example. Building high quality engineered public structures with chunky foundations on Wellington road space doesn’t come cheap.

There are currently 15 bus stops along the Golden Mile and the plan is to increase shelter space in the central city with 10 much higher capacity bus stops on the Golden Mile, plus additional six bus stops to be added along the proposed new bus route parallel to the Golden Mile. All of this will be done based on community feedback, GIS modelling and pedestrian access information to better place where stops need to be, so people have access to shelters in the right places and bus journeys flow smoothly. We need a good balance between the number of bus stops and the length of journey times and we haven’t got it right now on the Golden Mile. These changes would result in no change in the number of inline bus stops.