Dialogue: Chance to unclog streets and restore life to bay

By STEPHEN SELWOOD*

Last century Auckland had the vision of a pohutukawa-fringed causeway launching out across Hobson Bay connecting the city with the Eastern Bays.

Tamaki Drive is now the City of Sails' signature tourist route. It provides an unrivalled maritime esplanade. But it has problems.

For much of the day it becomes just another arterial route, clogged with cars and heavy container trucks. An Eastern Corridor already runs through local community roads and Tamaki Drive is part of it.

Hobson Bay has suffered environmental damage. Where open sea once washed through the bay, Tamaki Drive and the rail embankment have blocked tidal flow, causing serious silting.

Alongside the embankment, Auckland now has the opportunity to create a new visually pleasing waterfront esplanade - Hobson Bay Drive - that will restore natural values, give transport options to commuters, and divert commuter traffic and heavy trucks from local streets in surrounding communities.

A sensitive use of the rail causeway corridor will achieve those goals. Singapore has landscaped expressways. Auckland can do better.

Eighty-eight per cent of Aucklanders favour urgently providing a mix of transport choice - including busway, cyclepath and motorway - alongside the existing rail embankment which joins Tamaki Drive east of the Parnell Baths.

Ngati Whatua environmental spokesman Bill Kapea also supports the development of a corridor that will not only greatly increase tidal flush into the bay, restoring life to its waters, but could also lead to the unsightly and decaying sewer line being shifted to run under a new roadway. This would provide much-needed capacity for Auckland's overstressed sewers.

Local iwi believe more tidal channels let into Tamaki Drive and the provision of bridges along the new Hobson Bay Drive could bring fresh vitality to the bay, transforming it into a flat-water amenity for watersport.

Adding walkways and picnic areas would turn the bay into a recreational asset.

The Tamaki Drive Protection Society also supports an environmentally sensitive development and is working towards a plan that will speed journey time along Tamaki Drive. Te Araroa, a group promoting nationwide walkways, also supports the concept of a multi-use corridor catering for cyclists and pedestrians.

Despite such overwhelming support, special care will have to be taken. Extensive planting of pohutukawa from the city railyards through to the Orakei Basin will screen the unsightly rail embankment from onshore view.

Transit New Zealand has developed imaginative options to effectively protect the wetlands of the environmentally fragile Purewa Creek. One option is to use the existing rail corridor to build the roadway on land, while shifting track to a narrow rail-bridge. This would cause minimal visual and environmental impact.

Design options on the expressway itself, apart from a low-gradient cycle path and vital busway capacity, could include no city-bound exit at Orakei Basin. This would ensure greatly reduced traffic volumes around the Hobson Bay shoreline and through the Domain, Parnell and Grafton Bridge.

Development of the corridor will concentrate a high volume of traffic in only the 1km section of Tamaki Drive at the city end. This short length of expressway can be landscaped in accordance with the rest of the Drive. And it can be designed without traffic lights or roundabouts, so as to handle all projected increases in traffic volume.

This will remove the existing bottleneck and improve journey times. Traffic will be fed into Quay St and to the new Grafton motorway link, offering rapid and effective dispersal around the city centre.

But the more important point is that commuter pressure on the rest of Tamaki Drive, including where it passes around the bays, will be greatly reduced.

As long as Auckland continues to experience economic and population growth, congestion will never disappear. The goal can only be to ease it to more acceptable levels.

But a balanced approach can significantly and permanently reduce traffic impact on local communities while also improving journey time.

A state-of-the-art expressway offering Aucklanders a choice of transport options - including bus rapid transit, private vehicle and cycle - is a common sense way to achieve these objectives on the Eastern Corridor.

Such an expressway will have the comfortable capacity to divert 4000 city-bound cars an hour from neighbourhood streets, many times the congestion relief rail is projected to provide by 2011. Bus rapid transit will double that capacity.

Adding a mix of transport options to the existing rail corridor will reduce pressure on the Southern Motorway and improve commuter time from outlying eastern suburbs, whether by bus or by car.

It is, therefore, disappointing that the Automobile Association's plan to improve environmental values has been criticised by Stop the Eastern Motorway.

Certainly it is ironic that two prominent members of that pressure group, Terence Gould and Auckland City councillor Jon Olsen, have waterside homes near the proposed corridor. Clearly, they have a vested interest.

Whether the interests of a select few should sentence the rest of the eastern suburbs to local roads frustratingly and increasingly clogged with commuter traffic is a question likely to be answered in the coming local body elections.

Now, however, is the time to urgently plan a quality multi-purpose expressway in a generously landscaped development of which the city can be proud.

* Stephen Selwood is the Automobile Association northern regional manager.