£45m Liverpool City Centre Transport Scheme

[E400]

RE: £45m Liverpool City Centre Transport Scheme
Just walked down The Strand and thought how they could speed up bus services enormously -

At the moment the section between James Street and Liverpool ONE bus station is enormous - loads of room on either side. They could easily fit 4 lanes (2 each direction) on the current north bound carriage way, then slim the current southbound carriage way down to 2 lanes (1 each way) which are especially for buses. These could run in isolation from James Street to Liverpool ONE bus station, with no access to any other vehicles and no access to The Strand from James Street. This would remove the traffic lights from the junction with James Street and would probably save a good 3-5 minutes on bus journeys out of Liverpool ONE and up James Street.

This would then leave the extra space for improving the pavements for pedestrians, and would allow for an off-road cycle path to be implemented on the north-bound pavement, still leaving more than enough room for pedestrians, trees and street furniture.

The only issue is Liverpool ONE car park - there would still need to be traffic lights to get out - this would cross both The Strand and the bus lanes. That is, unless they can implement contraflow in the access tunnels - ie the current southbound tunnel becomes the 'IN' and the northbound access tunnel becomes the 'OUT', with a long and gentle lane merge to keep a good traffic flow. This would no doubt require some reconfiguration of the car park and the full cooperation of Q-Park, while meaning that access is only from the southbound lanes.

This is a very rough illustration, not to scale, but gets the idea across... red is the bus road; blue is The Strand; green is the cycle path :

Thoughts?