Residents remain in dark over key link

As the Transport Agency prepares to open a new motorway through Mt Roskill next week, uncertainty remains over how it will eventually reach the Northwestern Motorway at Waterview.

Although a review on using tunnels or a motorway was to have been ready last month, officials are collecting new information at the request of Transport Minister Steven Joyce.

"Officials are doing some more work with it, and we'll have more to say shortly," a spokeswoman for the minister told the Herald yesterday.

Serious doubt over whether tunnels would be built - as favoured by the previous Labour-led Government - has engulfed the Waterview link since January, when Mr Joyce reported a cost blowout to between $2.77 billion and $3.16 billion and ordered a review.

He set officials a target of last month for completing the review.

Although they are understood to have met that deadline for preparing a report, the minister has sought more information to add confidence to a decision on the link, which is set to become an issue among candidates for the Mt Albert byelection.

The delay comes as a $201 million extension of the Southwestern Motorway from Hillsborough to New Windsor is due to be opened in stages from the end of next week.

Residents are being invited to cycle or walk along the 4.5km route at an open day preview on Saturday.

The Roskill extension, while reducing congestion on Hillsborough Rd, is expected to spill large volumes of traffic through Avondale and Sandringham until such time as the Waterview link carries it a further 4.5km to the Northwestern Motorway to complete Auckland's western ring route.

Although the Transport Agency has put considerable effort into urban design aspects of the motorway extension, community and environmental groups in Mt Albert and Waterview say a surface option is out of the question for their suburb.

Eden Albert Community Board chairman Christopher Dempsey has told Prime Minister John Key in a letter that the tunnels proposal followed careful analysis and a recognition of "the huge environmental cost that a traditional surface motorway would cast on local communities - noise, air and light pollution".

Although Mr Key has referred the letter to Mr Joyce, board deputy chairman Phil Chase said it was frustrating that the minister was refusing to meet community representatives during the review of route options.

"This is the time he should be talking to us," said Mr Chase, who criticised the Roskill motorway as "a dinosaur project".

Council for Infrastructure Development chief executive Stephen Selwood was not clear about the extra information being sought by the minister, but his "gut feeling" was that the Government would choose a surface option, although with enhanced environmental and social mitigation.