We meant to stop in at Cambridge for a sandwich and a look at the antique shop, we really did. But we thundered past the sign on the Waikato Expressway, expecting there might be another exit for the town centre. By the time we realised there wasn’t, it was far too late.
We were on one final drive with Mum, because it was time to place her ashes where they belonged, alongside Dad’s in Waikanae. Any drive south holds memories of road trips before but it’s a different drive now.
The expressway, a road of national significance, is a brutally utilitarian 102km, crossed by the beams of endless concrete bridges, rated for 110km/h. It cost $2.4 billion, meaning the average cost per kilometre of $23.5 million is nearly as much as the five-year operating budget of Te Huia, the popular but threatened Auckland-to-Hamilton passenger rail service.
It is no slight on Hamilton to say it’s a relief not to have to drive through it to head south. Yet these big roads are not ultimately for our benefit, but for the heavy vehicles that carry our economic goods since the withering of rail. Operators of the trucks also do most of the damage to the roads (across the highway system, we spend more than $20,000 per km annually on maintenance) and contribute about a quarter of road-user charges.
To avoid works north of Taupō, the AA’s journey planner took us off State Highway 1 after the expressway expired and into unknown, pretty territory along the Waikato River, then along the back of the lake and up to the Desert Road, which is not the nerve-racking climb it was when I first drove it 40 years ago. It was dark by the time we turned off another expressway, the Kāpiti one, and drove beside it, through one of the strange, slightly lost places the new road has created.
Later the following day, Mum was at rest and we were headed to Wellington via Transmission Gully: late, controversial, over-budget, bumpy in places and as exhilarating as you’d want a $1.25b project to be. The big roads to Wellington will eventually begin before Levin, changing each place that SH1 no longer goes through (footfall is down for Ōtaki’s famous outlet stores but apparently it’s much nicer there without the traffic).
Our return through Wairarapa and Hawkes Bay days later could hardly have been more different. SH2 still feeds through the towns. Greytown is as lush as its name is not: all concept stores and well-dressed women from elsewhere. Would Woodville be nicer if big trucks and farm utes didn’t storm past its mad, intriguing junk shops, or would it disappear altogether?
The next day’s homecoming was a harsh one. We had allowed for 40 minutes’ worth of stop-go delays on the Napier-Taupō highway and a few more for works on SH1, and we seemed well set to make a prior engagement that evening.
We entered the Auckland motorway system about 4pm, turned off at SH20 and shortly after just … stopped. Google Maps sent us – and, it appeared, a few other drivers – off the motorway on to suburban streets where things seemed nearly as bad, and then back on a few kilometres later to the same anxious crawl.
Up to $37b worth of roads of national significance are lined up but there is no road we can build out of this: the Auckland highways we were stuck on were all either built or substantially upgraded in the past decade.
After spending nearly a third of our Napier-to-Auckland journey time actually in Auckland, we made it home just in time to leave again for our event.
We scanned the internet in search of the terrible accident that had caused our motorway crisis, but there wasn’t one. It was merely a Tuesday afternoon.
