New Everton Stadium - Hill Dickinson Stadium




John from Bootle said:
But as @Saint Domingo pointed out, we don't seem to have a problem at Goodison. Kirkdale gets less trains than Sandhills. There's also other options. Bank Hall is only 5 mins away from Sandhills and Old Hall Street is less than 1.5 miles from the ground.

@Dr Baxter pointed out that not everybody can get the train, and I agree that bus services will need to be laid on, but other than that, I think the transport links are fine.
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I haven't read all of the latest revision of the transport plan yet, so perhaps some of the detail has been added and the issues have been ironed out..... because the earliest version was woefully lacking.

With destination Kirkby, the transport plan also appeared comprehensive at first, with plenty of schematics and explanation of a seemingly plausible park and ride schemes with some figures to support it. Wyness famously even called it the most accessible stadium in the country. However, none of it stood up to the most basic scrutiny, park and ride became park and walk when it was realised that the number of buses required simply didnt exist and eventually decended to park and treck, with the infamous crush-loading on the trains and marshalling area with several hour dispersal predictions. It was literally laughed out of the inquiry after the umpteenth revision came with knowsley council's own damning small print clause that would've seriously cut the permitted capacity to less than GP, after they'd found that their own transport modellers couldn't make it all work. The logistics simply didn't add up.

The issue with BMD is that it is currently in a bit of a public transport blind spot with no real provision at the site. The northern line is a great saving grace of course, but it's a single island platform and over 1 km away. The network also only serves a small proportion of the Liverpool conurbation with approx 6k/hr capacity in both north and south directions (by comparison some London stadiums have multiples of that capacity, yet are still notorious for the early darters trying to catch those trains). Another purpose built station at Vauxhall was originally spoken about with some optimism and would've certainly helped to improve dispersal logistics, but so far that hasn't been forthcoming with Colin Chong saying they'd drawn a complete blank on that, a few months ago.

The other blindingly obvious issue is that the walkable catchment for parking is more than halved by being on the waterfront, with also a much reduced road grid density compared to the tightly packed terraced area around Walton. With a far greater number of available major traffic lanes in all directions. That can never be matched at a waterfront location, and is the motive for the club stipulating that they would need to at least reverse the current ratio of 60:40 private/public transport to avoid serious congestion and achieve desired access and dispersal rates.

Of course the whole idea of moving closer to town is to greatly increase the numbers of people using public transport with all districts in the city region having regular services into town and all of its major local and national transport hubs. I think it's fair to say that BMD is right at the furthest edge of that envelope, with the walk from Lime Street station for instance very similar in distance to that to GP.

Yes, many things can be done to extend or redirect a proportion of the existing bus routes to BMD on match days where turnaround times can be achieved without affecting schedules, but again much will depend on if those roads can support that level of increased traffic and pedestrian footfall to allow the flow.
As I said, i haven't read the latest docs fully, but i didn't see any evidence of modelling in the earliest version to show how we all get to and from the site effectively.
 
Dr Baxter said:
That said, I think some of the estimates of walking distances quoted are a tad optimistic. Sandhills to Bank Hall in 5 minutes? No chance. It's about 15. Dale Street to the new ground is half an hour. Well it is for me, anyhow. I've timed myself.
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