Goodbye to the Banks highway

The Eastern highway is history after Auckland City councillors yesterday voted to dump the project in favour of moving people by rapid transit to and from the city's booming southeastern industrial and residential suburbs.

"Today is the day we have saved Hobson Bay," declared transport and urban linkages committee chairman Richard Simpson, one of two Action Hobson councillors elected two months ago on an anti-highway ticket.

By a vote of 8-3, the committee abandoned the highway component of the highway from Glen Innes to the city down the environmentally sensitive Purewa Creek, across Orakei Basin and Hobson Bay to join Tamaki Drive.

The decision will be ratified by the full council next week.

Mr Simpson said the council had protected a natural landform in Hobson Bay and the challenge now was to embrace rapid transit to move people, not cars, around the region with the help of the city's new transport planning body, the Auckland Regional Transport Authority.

This followed advice to the committee by council officers that there was a "serious and urgent need to improve transport choices and infrastructure in the southeast". Doing nothing was not an option.

Not only was the existing land use and transport infrastructure unacceptable and unsustainable but future growth in the east and southeast and neighbouring suburbs in Manukau needed addressing, officers said.

The suburbs of Glen Innes, Panmure and Sylvia Park were forecast to grow from 12,000 to 32,000 over the next 20 years; Mt Wellington quarry was being turned into housing for up to 8000 people; Auckland University's Tamaki campus was forecast to grow to 10,000 students and staff and a nearby technology park would provide up to 6000 jobs; and a huge retail, commercial and residential development was planned for Sylvia Park.

The movement of freight, goods and services would increase to and from the southeast and there would be more traffic on arterial and local roads.

Doug Armstrong, a Citizens & Ratepayers Now councillor and highway supporter, said the election result that gave anti-highway opponents a majority was not a mandate to carry out a demolition job on the highway without public consultation.

"This is out of sync with a majority of people's views on completion of the motorway network."