East Auckland is most definitely the most neglected part of the city when it comes to having good transport links. By East Auckland I mean everything east of the Tamaki River – ie. Pakuranga, Highland Park, Howick, Botany and Flat Bush. Up until the 1960s this area was barely developed at all, with Howick being the only town. 1959 aerial photography shows the part of Pakuranga closest to the city was only just starting to develop. Since that time there has been a huge amount of growth, first in the northern part of the area with Pakuranga, Howick, Highland Park, Bucklands Beach and so forth developing in the 1960s-1980s. My Nana lives in Highland Park, in a house that was probably built in the late 1970s. Later in, in the 1990s and early 2000s we have seen Botany, Dannemora and Flat Bush develop.
However, throughout all of this staged development nobody has ever put the slightest amount of thought into answering the question “how are we effectively going to link these people with the rest of the city?” Up until 1996 that question was particularly poorly addressed, as all the roads ended up feeding into a 4 lane arterial route through Mt Wellington and eventually feeding onto the Southern Motorway from Mt Wellington Highway. I never really saw this at peak hour, because we’d only go out that way on weekends, but I imagine it was pretty horrific. Since 1996 things have been slightly improved with the addition of the Southeastern Highway, but that road was built to a rather sub-optimal standard – with at-grade intersections where there should have been fully separated ones – and it still had the same problem of feeding into an already congested Southern Motorway.
Whilst buses out east have operated for an extremely long time, I think the Howick and Eastern Buses are the longest-standing bus operators in Auckland, it is probably the part of Auckland that is most poorly serviced by public transport. A bus from Howick or Botany can take significantly more than an hour to get to the city, due to terrible (ie. non-existent) bus priority measures throughout the Manukau City part of the trip, and then a long and fairly convoluted route that is taken throughout the Auckland City part of the route. Amazingly, a bus trip from Howick to the city takes about as long as one from Pukekohe or Orewa, even though these other places are far far further from downtown than Howick is. Therefore, it is absolutely no surprise that this corner of the city is the most car dependent part of Auckland. This isn’t helped by the area being characterised by incredibly stereotypical sprawl, but I think that the incredibly slow travel times for public transport are the main contributor to East Auckland’s automobile depedency.
At a risk of sounding harsh on past planners of Auckland, this situation is really utterly unacceptable. Back in the 1960s the whole area was undeveloped, and it would have been a piece of cake to set aside a corridor for a future rail alignment. The Eastern Line actually runs pretty close to where road bridges have been built linking East Auckland with the isthmus, so it surely wasn’t completely beyond the realms of possibility to think that rail could have served this area quite effectively. Even from the roads-centric point of view it’s obvious that there are going to be significant problems in feeding the traffic from the main roads of Pakuranga Road and Ti Rakau Drive (which are congested enough by themselves) over the Tamaki River bridges (which for some silly reason were basically built next to each other) and further on to link up with the Southern Motorway. A map below shows this mess quite clearly:
Oh, and just to make things worse, on that corner of Pakuranga Road and Ti Rakau Drive (which by the way is the busiest intersection in all of Auckland) we’re going to build a shopping mall, just to ruin the traffic even more. The lack of foresight that went into the planning of this part of Auckland is utterly reprehensible and the people who live out there today are still suffering because of it.
In the past few years there have been some vague attempts at trying to improve this situation. The Highbrook interchange was completed a few years ago, although I’m still utterly convinced that this was entirely built to serve the commercial area of East Tamaki and Highbrook – basically crapping on the poor people of Wymondley and Otahuhu to provide faster motorway access to a billion dollar commercial development. Nice. The Highbrook interchange still fails in relieving pressure from the pinch point – in that it’s terribly signposted from the Flat Bush side and also doesn’t have a logical link through to Te Irirangi Drive. Furthermore, it does nothing for public transport, so the area has remained a public transport wasteland. Not a particularly smart idea when you’re proposing a “new town” of 40,000 people out at Flat Bush.
The next step proposed to alleviate the mess is AMETI, the Auckland-Manukau-Eastern-Transport-Initiative… I think. What it should really read is the “roads, roads, more roads, maybe an odd bus lane to shut you dumb greenies up and we’ll think about a train line perhaps after 2020 initiative”. The image below shows the AMETI plan…. lots of new roads and just a few bus lanes to keep the greenies happy.
So absolutely no mention of any additional rail capacity out this way. Perhaps the bus lanes might save a few minutes off the trip times between Pakuranga and Panmure but why are there no bus lanes planned for Pakuranga Road, or Ti Rakau Drive beyond its immediate proximity to Pakuranga? There’s no mention of what might be done to speed bus trips up once they have crossed the Tamaki River, or anything of that sort. So basically we get tonnes more roads with a few tiny concessions regarding bus lanes.
It takes a look forward to the post 2016 (read: bloody ages away) concepts before we even get mention of something that might possibly be a future rail line to serve this part of the city. No real plans though, at least not in the detail that has been done for the roading parts of AMETI, just a few squiggly lines:
On the up-side, if the green lines were all built as railway lines then there’s the potential for Auckland to have a fantastic rail network. On the down side, it seems like the planners of AMETI are giving themselves every opt out clause possible. Indicative alignments only, some time post 2016 plans and so forth. Of course this is translation for “once we sort out the roads we’ll see what’s left in the budget for public transport”. The other problem with the proposed additional “rapid transit networks” (which could be a busway, train line or seemingly even bus lanes according to the planners of the Central Connector) is that a huge part of East Auckland remains unserved. Howick, Highland Park, Bucklands Beach and so forth remains a heck of a long bus trip away from a railway station. Instead, we have the railway line serving a light-industry area along Ti Rakau Drive between Pakuranga and Botany. Once again, hardly ideal.
I shall attempt to offer some real solutions to the “East Auckland Problem” in my next post. The solutions are unlikely to be easy – the lack of foresight shown by planners in the past 50 years have put paid to that being a possiblity – or cheap, but they are there. One just needs to think about it a bit and consider East Auckland as actually being a part of the city that could be a real success story for public transport in the future.
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