Rudman's city: Road route runs roughshod over volcanic cone heritage

What a crazy world we live in.

Last week we had, in quick succession:

1. Auckland City parks committee members patting themselves on the back for removing mountain-destroying cows from Mt Eden.

2. An Auckland City hearings panel solemnly considering a notification from Transit New Zealand of its desire to bulldoze a six-lane sunken highway through the northern foothills of Mt Roskill.

Transit's application is one of the planning niceties it has to go through before starting work on the much-delayed State Highway 20 extension from Hillsborough to Richardson Rd in Mt Albert.

It doesn't actually have to take any notice of the hearing panel's views, but if it ignores them, it risks time-delaying appeals to the Environment Court.

To put my cards on the table from the start, I support extending the existing Onehunga motorway through Mt Albert and on to the existing Northwestern Motorway.

What I'm not happy about is Transit's old Ministry of Works "we road builders know best" mindset when it comes to the route.

You would have thought that by now it would have got through to the road builders that we Aucklanders, after an admittedly slow start, now see the volcanic cones we share our city with as part of what makes us Aucklanders.

One or other of them might even have received a Christmas card from Mayor Christine Fletcher last December which said Auckland is "as unique as its volcanic cones."

Over the past 150 years it's true we haven't looked after that uniqueness very well. The first European settlers counted 63 cones dotting the isthmus. Only 35 now remain, many survivors showing the scars of past attitudes.

Mt Roskill, for example, had its summit drilled out as recently as 1962 to make way for a large concrete water reservoir.

Such destruction of our "identity" was, I had hoped, part of our ugly past. In the early 1970s, Auckland's 30-odd local bodies joined to draw up rules to protect our volcanic heritage.

Last August, the treasured status of our volcanoes was underlined when neighbours of Epsom's Mt St John persuaded the city to halt private development high on its slopes by buying the site and incorporating it into the park.

Now this.

Transit's approach to Mt Roskill is a lurch back into the attitudes of the bad old days when the Public Works Act was the Bible and the bulldozer was king.

The proposal is to drive the motorway across Dominion Rd and through the bottom slopes of the cone where the tennis club now stands.

Transit wants Brownie points for not exploiting its existing rights - dating back some 50 years - which allowed first a railway, then a roadway as well, to run much closer, and more destructively, to the centre of the peak.

But even the most gung ho of road engineers would have realised such destruction was no longer a political starter. Hence the modified present scheme.

This has the highway cutting into the north edge of the mountain, resulting in a sheer 11.5m retaining wall running up from the roadway.

Opponents say this wall would be between a quarter and fifth the height of the mountain at that point and dramatically change the form of the land.

In his submission to the committee, former Auckland Regional Conservator Dr Graeme Campbell said this would result in "the destruction of a significant portion of the northern flank of the volcano."

He said "this is one further cut in a litany of cuts" and to reject it would be "to signal the unacceptability of such destruction in this century and to signal a concern for the cumulative effect of repeated single cuts to the finite cones resource."

He's right. It's time to draw the line and say, "No more."

Transit could also reflect on the wishes of George Winstone, who in 1928 gifted the mountain to Aucklanders "for the enjoyment of the people for all time."

There is an alternative route just 40m or so north. Transit says it would mean the destruction of 16 more houses than its preferred path required.

Given that 120 houses more are for the chop between Hillsborough Rd and Richardson Rd, it is a very small price to pay.