KEY POINTS:
Transit NZ plans to demolish about 160 homes - including just over 100 Housing NZ properties - if it digs a $1.89 billion set of twin motorway tunnels along Auckland's western bypass.
It will also negotiate underground strata titles beneath about 150 other properties, which will account for 3.2km of a 4.5km section of bypass to be completed by 2015 between Maioro St in New Windsor and the Northwestern Motorway at Waterview.
But the agency said yesterday that bored tunnels up to 40m deep would avoid the "potentially significant social and environment upheaval" of an earlier covered-trench proposal, which would have required the demolition of about 500 homes and careful measures to protect Oakley Creek.
A giant boring machine will gobble through 10m to 15m of sub-strata a day, producing what Transit acknowledges will be some surface vibration, and possibly minor ground settlement.
Subject to Transit's confirmation of the plan after consultations to run until April, 105 homes face demolition at the northern end of the tunnels at Waterview and 55 near their southern portals in Hendon Park, just west of the intersection of Richardson and Stoddard Rds.
