Revised highway ends up as byway

By MATHEW DEARNALEY


Auckland's controversial eastern highway faces being bled into a pale shadow of its former self, reducing traffic to 50km/h on long stretches and to a two-lane bridge across Hobson Bay.

Both Auckland City Mayor John Banks and his Manukau counterpart, Sir Barry Curtis, endorsed in principle yesterday a consultants' report recommending a hacked-back version of the project on which they have hung their political hats.

But they emphasised it would be up to their councils to make final decisions after the October elections, leaving opponents concerned the project may yet be revved back up, once political pressure eases.

The arterial road rather than motorway project now recommended by Opus International Consultants at a cost of about $1.2 billion is a far cry from a grandiose proposal proffered in March which threatened to balloon to almost $4 billion.

Auckland City passenger transport committee chairman Greg McKeown, who heads the project's political steering committee, said the far leaner scheme represented a "big step forward, moving a smaller foot".

He emphasised a need to "manage" travel demand and encourage greater use of buses and trains to complement road-building.

But AA spokesman Stephen Selwood lamented what he called a significantly compromised option which would deny motorists a direct connection to the Northwestern Motorway through Grafton Gully.

"We risk managing down our ability to do business and enjoy our way of life - it reduces our mobility, which is what stimulates economic growth."

Instead of extending to at least three lanes in each direction, including a bus lane and with parallel pedestrian and cycleways along its 27km route, the project is likely to be cut to no more than two lanes.

Bus lanes from Britomart to Panmure and a tunnel under Parnell have already been chopped from the project, and the consultants now recommend that a bridge across Hobson Bay be confined to just one traffic lane in each direction.

This has failed to placate Action Hobson city council candidate Christine Caughey, who said any spread of tarmac across the bay was unacceptable.

Gone is a plan to widen Tamaki Drive to at least four lanes each way, which Mr McKeown said would have required a major harbour reclamation and a sprawling and unsightly traffic interchange around Gladstone Rd on the waterfront.

Also off the drawing board are sections of elevated motorway next to Mt Wellington Highway and Waipuna Rd, which will now be merely widened for inclusion in the project, although there will be a duplicate Pakuranga Bridge.

A link to East Tamaki through Allens Rd, entailing another bridge across Tamaki River to Mt Wellington via Panama Rd, will be considered later as a possible add-on at an extra cost of about $400 million.

The use of existing roads means vehicles will be restricted to 50km/h everywhere except for the 9km between Hobson Bay and Glen Innes, where speeds of up to 80km/h will be allowed.

Tamaki Drive will remain a 50km zone, after the new road joins it next to the Outdoor Boating Club, and project director Grant Kirby admitted the stretch between there and the central city would remain a traffic bottleneck.

The only indicated bus lanes will be between Pakuranga and Panmure, where passengers will be encouraged to switch to trains, but not even these are guaranteed unless they can be squeezed into the existing Ti Rakau Drive without any neighbouring property purchases.

Only about 260 homes and businesses will be displaced along the route, compared with 1270 under the original plan.

Just over 200 will be in Auckland City, mostly around Panmure and Glen Innes, where the road will be sunk into a 350m covered trench for $60 million to $90 million to avoid cutting off the town centre from business and university developments.

Mr Banks said property purchases in the earlier plan would have cost Auckland about $900 million, compared with about $90 million for the new proposal.

Neither mayor was willing to concede defeat yesterday, with Sir Barry calling the new proposal an excellent one and Mr Banks denying he ever committed himself to anything grander. He admitted not realising it would have been so difficult to fulfil his pledge at the last election to build an "eastern transport corridor".