Editorial: Kmart expansion shows up poor infrastructure planning

There are already long queues for low-cost petrol at Costco. Photo / Michael Craig

EDITORIAL

Kmart’s announcement that it will open its largest store ever in Auckland’s Northwest is good news in a retail environment under pressure from the cost of living crisis and overseas online retailers who offer ever cheaper deals.

But mixed with that positive move has been reactions of angst over the extra traffic it will bring and the poor design of the roads around the fast-growing retail centre.

Westgate developer Mark Gunter has been locked in a court battle for years with the Auckland council and NZTA over roading problems in the area and will head to court again next week in another appeal.

The Northwest shopping centre has New Zealand’s only Costco Wholesale supermarket and already that has driven big lines of traffic. On Sundays the queue for its low-cost petrol station snakes around the block.

A new $20 million Asian supermarket has also recently opened in the area, as well as a raft of fast food operators.

Maki Street where Costco is located and Kmart will be open by 2026 is narrow and was never built to handle high volumes of traffic. Compounding that is the fact that while shoppers can easily access the area coming from the city, there is no close on-ramp for them to get back on the motorway and return home.

A motorway overpass that would have allowed shoppers to loop back to the motorway from the northern end of Maki Street has yet to be completed by NZTA.

Just 15 years ago the area was largely greenfields and strawberry farms. A master plan of the area could have been co-ordinated between the developer, council, Auckland Transport and NZTA to come up with a clear plan for how to manage traffic.

Thousands of new houses have been built in the surrounding area at Hobsonville Point, Kumeu, Riverhead, Whenuapai and Massey where thousands more are planned.

Auckland Council considers Westgate one of the city’s four major growth areas, alongside Manukau in the south, Albany in the north and the central business district in Auckland’s heart.

Yet in nearby housing development Red Hills, sewage from 300 new homes is going into holding tanks and being trucked to a wastewater pump station because there is no permanent wastewater infrastructure.

Cardinal West is a 470-home development on a former dairy farm at Red Hills on the urban-rural fringe in West Auckland where 341 homes, 40 of them empty, have been built without permanent wastewater solutions.

Instead, the new homes, selling for $850,000 to $900,000, are connected to temporary tanks at four boarded-up “tank farms” where tankers collect the wastewater and truck it to the Massey North wastewater pump station.

Yes, New Zealand needs more houses but it also needs the roads and wastewater infrastructure development to go hand in hand with this. Roads should be built to cater for the future - not just the traffic of today.

If we want big international retail chains - including a third supermarket player - to come here we need to get our private and public sectors to work together to get the infrastructure in place to make it work for everyone.