Height change could reduce maunga to backdrop

View from Te Atatu motorway onramp across to Mount Albert. Photo / Chris Loufte

For motorists approaching the city from the Northwestern Motorway, the view that unfolds from the Te Atatu interchange sums up Auckland. Yes, there's a motorway, but the wide view is of harbour and volcanic landforms.

It is no accident that the first cone that looms into view is Mt Albert (Owairaka).

Since the mid-1990s, a protected viewshaft running from the Te Atatu interchange to the maunga has limited the height of development. Now, one of the city's biggest landholders, Tram Lease (a division of Tramco), says the viewshaft, A13, should be deleted from the planning rulebook or substantially modified - arguing it is "not regionally significant". "The viewing audience is typically travelling in vehicles at speed, while trying to merge into the frequently heavy motorway traffic," its expert witness, Clinton Bird, told the unitary plan hearings panel.

"The cone is not iconic, retains little volcanic resemblance and appears contiguous with the surrounding residential slopes."

Tram Lease owns a long strip of New North Rd, alongside the railway line, between the Mt Albert shops and Woodward Rd. This land, it says, has "a significant role to play in Auckland's future compactness and intensification".

It wants to build as high as 31m (nearly four times what's allowed by the current district plan viewshaft), claiming this would "have a negligible effect on the overall visual integrity of the cone".

Another Tramco expert witness, John Schellekens, claims A13 promises to reduce land values "by up to 40 per cent in the context of foregone urban intensification opportunities".

Defending the viewshaft for the Auckland Council, consultant landscape architect Stephen Brown says Mt Albert introduces and reintroduces the volcanic field to a massive volume of road users approaching the city from the west. He warns of the potential for "large blocks of development" along New North Rd to relegate the maunga to a "backdrop" role.

However, the council has already ceded ground, raising the zone height limit to 16.5m in the draft unitary plan and the viewshaft limit even higher.