Brian Rudman: Road to nowhere rises from ashes

COMMENT

The last word at Wednesday's last rites for the doomed eastern highway project went to project director Grant Kirby. Asked what would happen when the new economy-version roadway joined up with downtown Tamaki Drive, he confessed, looking away from his mayoral masters, "there will be a bottleneck in the city as there is now".

When the city's Mr Fix-it - the man brought in to sort out Motat, Britomart and Auckland transport - admits defeat, you know the game is up.

Earlier, Auckland Mayor John Banks had declared, "it is starting to look like commonsense", and was rather put out when asked how, then, would he now describe the earlier $4 billion scheme he was once so keen on.

Of course we should be joyful that the two cheerleading mayoral proponents of the highway, Mr Banks and Manukau City's Sir Barry Curtis, are now backing a $1.2 billion project rather than the $4 billion one. But if the job can be done for less than a third of the original cost, you have to again ask, was there any job to be done in the first place?

We were told it was essential that $4 billion be spent on a grandiose scheme complete with dedicated bus lanes, rail links and cycleways in order to significantly reduce congestion, improve journey times, provide direct links to the Grafton Gully motorways and to the port. The latter was to divert over 80 per cent of heavy trucks off local roads and the southern motorway.

Suddenly, all of this is declared bollocks. The commonsense solution is to think small after all. Well, if that's the new orthodoxy, then why just $1.2 billion small. Why not $800 million small, or the $460 million it was just three or four years back?

What was dished up on Wednesday, once the packaging was discarded, was little more than an upgrade of roads at the eastern end of the planned corridor, roads which have long been neglected by the two councils, and a token two-lane road running alongside the maintrunk railway into downtown Auckland.

Any pretence at this being a "transport" corridor are tossed out the door. On April 21, Mr Banks was declaring on radio, "People in Auckland like John Haigh QC want public transport. He's right. We're going to have two lanes of trains and four lanes of buses and cycleways and walkways." It seems the April orthodoxy is now heresy. The new scheme is predominantly road only.

Abandoning the busway is, of course, commonsense, given it was to run alongside an under-used rail line. But if it can go, then why not abandon the new road through the ecologically and geologically precious harbourside front door of downtown Auckland as well.

At least the $4 billion project had the authority of being part of a grand design - however flawed, which is more than can be said for the remnant two-lane road which is all that remains. This puny road is more the sullen revenge of a loser, the coin-scratch left on the door of a rich man's Ferrari.

Mr Banks agreed on Wednesday that opponents of the grandiose highway across Hobson Bay had "rightly" called it desecration. And before he became mayor he told me he would tunnel under Hobson Bay rather than drive a highway through the middle of this beautiful bay.

Now that it's a runty road-to-nowhere, surely the desecration is greater if it's allowed to proceed.

Yesterday Mr Banks invited me to witness his opening of New Zealand's largest urban wetland restoration project at Remuera's Waiatarua Reserve. "What was previously a swamp has been transformed in a beautiful wetland for all our citizens to enjoy," said the invite. The $5.9 million project will trap and filter stormwater flowing out in the Orakei Basin and Waitemata Harbour.

"Auckland City is committed to preserving our city's wetlands" for the benefits of future generations, he said. How can he say this when he's presiding over plans to carve a roadway through the Purewa Creek wetlands, past the $5.9 million project he's about to open, desecrating the Orakei Basin volcanic crater and Hobson Bay on the way through?