Queen Street in Brisbane is fairly wide too, but because shops, fountains, seating and other stuff pops up in the middle of the road it doesn’t seem too wide.

High Street should be a no-brainer.

If you had just the two traffic phases you could have the main north-south traffic flow (the primary traffic flow of buses and pedestrians) on the ‘green’ say two-thirds of the time, and the cross traffic and pedestrian flow the remaining one third of the time. This way buses and people would have almost unrestricted access up and down the street because of the lengthy green signals, buy because there are only two phases, you would still be able to walk or drive across the street more often than at present. This does mean losing the popular ‘barnes dance’ all-cross signal, but I think the payoff would be more than worth it.

Plus people could fairly safely cross the busway mid block (unless it was very busy), as the roadway would be only about 7m from curb to curb and the sightlines up and down the street would be excellent.

Also as the intersections would be much smaller in area, there would be more road side edges on the cross streets in close to Queen. These would be the ideal location for loading zones, taxi ranks and mobility parking spaces. Plus the closure of Queen St to general traffic would render the smaller side streets culs-de-sac, which could be converted into pocket parks and mini squares where they meet Queen, with angle parking, loading zones etc a little further back (I’m thinking the bottom of Fort and Shortland here, and Wynyard).

Nick, I like your idea actually of making Queen St the pedestrian/PT corridor and Albert St the arterial. One issue is how long it takes buses to traverse Queen St at the moment, but I guess that’s due to complicated traffic light phasing and the lack of bus lanes – both of which could be fixed by your idea.

Pedestrianising Queens St Auckland should be the goal and a good time to do it will be in conjunction with the CBD Rail loop getting constructed.

Maybe Queen St wouldn’t be so dead at night if it were an nice place to go to, i.e. without a four lane highway up the middle. It will still have it’s cross streets every few hundred metres anyway. For sure those boy racers ad a bit of colour to the place but it isn’t exactly what most people would call safe and pleasant.

Queen St is too wide to work well as a fully pedestriann space. I think it should be restricted to just two bus lanes in the middle. This would allow the intersections to be smaller and more people friendly as there would be no need for turning lanes. Also this would improve traffic flow considerably on the remaining streets, as the intersections would have only two phases, one for pedestrians and buses moving north-south and a second for pedestrains and traffic crossing east west. Albert street could have it’s bus lanes removed and be marked with four general traffic lanes as the main north-south street for traffic. In my opinion Albert is better suited to this role, and the local urban environment would be less affected.

I think they have it the wrong way around: A four lane arterial on the central shopping and entertainment street that has no driveways, carparks or loading zones, and then they put the bus lanes on the parallel street that has little pedestrian attraction but is full of driveways, parking buildings and loading docks!

How about prioritising the street with pedestrain facilities for pedestrians and public transport users, and turning the one that has all the car based facilities into the highway?!