KEY POINTS:
Onehunga residents and their community board are calling for a motorway interchange to be built underground to avoid further tainting of Auckland City's main gateway from the airport.
They want Transit NZ to abandon plans for a 7m bridge above the Hopua volcanic crater in Gloucester Park and to dig an underpass as part of a $265 million project to duplicate the Manukau Harbour motorway crossing in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup.
The Maungakiekie Community Board has called for an underpass in submissions on the project which closed last week and will be assessed by Auckland and Manukau city and regional council commissioners at planning hearings early next year.
Some residents want the motorway itself along Onehunga Bay - which Transit intends widening to three lanes - to be buried to restore the waterfront access they lost 30 years ago after the former Ministry of Works and Development built the existing Mangere Bridge.
Although Auckland City staff say a "quarter diamond" interchange with ground-level approaches to the bridge is a far more acceptable than the steep ramps Transit planned to sink into the Hopua crater, the council's transport committee has passed several resolutions sympathetic to local concerns.
These include calls for Government pressure on Transit to complete the harbour crossing in time for the rugby cup not to compromise efforts to find the best solutions for the city and local community, for greater mitigation measures around the waterfront, and for compensation for losses of open space.
The committee also wants Transit to improve traffic access to the motorway from the east, along Neilson St, which it has been trying to persuade the agency to adopt as a state highway rather than leaving the city council to widen it to four lanes for at least $12 million.
And it has resolved that the council should, in its work with Transit and other agencies on transport projects, give the Manukau Harbour equal priority to its Waitemata counterpart "in terms of protecting and enhancing its quality and public access, amenity and enjoyment".
Onehunga businessman Jim Jackson told the committee that the motorway project should be seized on as an opportunity to "tidy up the ugly duckling of Auckland" instead of compounding past offences by building an interchange which he said would obliterate what little was left of the community's view of its waterfront.
Mr Jackson, who runs an electrical manufacturing business beneath Transpower's pylons through Onehunga and who opposes plans to boost their electricity throughput, also said new improved lines should be buried along a more direct route through the motorway corridor.
Maungakiekie Community Board chairwoman Bridget Graham said that if the city council truly wanted to put Auckland on the world map, it needed to look past a short-term fix, to solutions such as tunnelling.
"There are huge complications because of the nature of past damage by the Ministry of Works or whatever, which broke the hearts of people in Onehunga, but we now have an opportunity to make some reparation," she told the city councillors.
"Do you want a world-class city, or does it only apply to the northern edge?"
Resident Colin Tunicliff said the existing motorway had disfigured the foreshore.
He said Transit had opened a precedent for tunnelling with its plan to run northbound lanes of State Highway 1 beneath Victoria Park and its investigations into building stretches of its proposed $1 billion-plus Waterview motorway extension underground.
He suggested it consider sinking the motorway along the Onehunga foreshore and provide "green bridges" over it for the local community to reach the harbour at ground level.
The community board has failed in past efforts to persuade Transit and the city council to build a low-level bridge for local traffic to cross the harbour to the east of Onehunga, and fears an extension of Neilson St across local roads to the Gloucester Park interchange will exacerbate congestion through its business district.
But city roads manager Matthew Rednall said congestion would worsen unless existing ramps were replaced by a bridge across the motorway, to which traffic would gain access from ramps to be built at ground level rather than in the air.
