Deleting a road in Green Square
Green Square is developing rapidly
In New York City it was found that traffic flowed better after the diagonal Broadway was closed to traffic in a few places, including Times Square. Sometimes there are street segments that might have once made sense in an earlier era, but have hung around far longer than needed.
This suggested example is around the Green Square rail station and redevelopment site, (map) involving these same two roads I talked about in a previous post at a different location. While it is no Times Square, there is a massive amount of development going in.
Green Square is a major redevelopment site just to the east of the image. The Green Square rail station is the south Central area. The pedestrian environment in this area is deplorable.
Today the Pink Box is bisected by the end of O'Riordan Street (the pink line segment), which otherwise more-or-less continues to Wyndham Street on the West. Botany Road is the main north-south road on the East side. Bourke Road here is East-West through the image (though it is mostly a north-south road). As can be seen in the image, most traffic follows O'Riordan to Wyndham anyway, to the regret of local residents. That would not change.
In this proposal, the Pink Box would be an enlarged Pedestrian Plaza.
Green Square and O'Riordan Street.
The required change is simple: Close O'Riordan Street in front of Green Square Station.
(While we are at it, the Wyndham Street/Bourke Road intersection doesn't need to flare out like that either).
The other streets are all two-lanes in each direction, but this diagonal makes signalling more difficult, and increases lost time, for very little gain (traffic from O'Riordan (NB) wanting to switch to Botany (NB) or Bourke (EB/NB) and vice versa).
All of these roads start near each other (all three: O'Riordan, Botany, and Bourke end at the airport in the south; O'Riordan (i.e. Wyndham/Gibbons) and Botany (i.e. Botany/Regent) come together in the North, and run into Circular Quay, while Elizabeth, which splits from Bourke terminates there as well. Bourke itself winds up about 10 blocks east. People who want to switch paths can use an East-West link (like Bourke here, and others up and down the corridor) as needed.
By simplifying the intersection, and retiming the signals I posit that both traffic flow and the pedestrian environment would improve. An appropriate set of pedestrian crosswalks at each leg of each intersection could be provided, and each crossing given a reasonable amount of green time. A pedestrian going from the northwest side of Wyndham to the Green Square station would only take two rather than 4 street crossings.
There is already planned a "Green Square to Ashmore Connector", (south of this location) but the analysis of that assumes this leg stays in place. The additional capacity there is one more way for traffic to move east-west or to change north-south routes.
Panorama - Second street from the right is the pink line segment on the map.
