Auckland’s most expensive roading project (to date) will begin construction in January next year, rather than in November next year, according to the Ministry of Transport. Just to show I’m not completely single-minded in my “roads sucks (except for buses), rail’s great” ideology, I do actually generally support the Victoria Park Tunnel project. A little bit of that support comes from a “woah cool, a tunnel” perspective, but it’s mainly recognition that previous upgrades to the Central Motorway Junction in Auckland have fed more and more traffic into the one significant remaining bottleneck – the 4 lane Victoria Park flyover. The results of this bottleneck aren’t just felt during peak hours (like many of the problems facing the Northern Motorway, Northwest Motorway and southern parts of the Southern Motorway), but rather can be felt at 3pm on Sunday afternoons.
It’s also good that the project is being built as a tunnel and not just a super-widened viaduct, which was what Transit originally proposed. A new three lane tunnel will be built for northbound traffic, while the existing 4 lane viaduct will be redesigned so that all lanes are for southbound traffic. Victoria Park is a very important inner-city park (we don’t actually have many of them) which has already been rather compromised by the existing viaduct. To double the width of that viaduct would have had significant adverse effects on the park, and would have totally removed the possibility of fully undergrounding the tunnel at some point in the future. Local residents groups did fight to have the whole thing tunnelled, but I think that option was both hugely expensive and practically difficult, as it would have required a very steep uphill section between where the tunnel passes underneath Victoria Street to where it would connect to the existing motorway. Even as it stands now the tunnel will have a very steep drop, but I guess it’s much easier for a road to drop steeply than to climb steeply. Perhaps some day in the future we’ll end up with the motorway fully undergrounded, and Victoria Park will be returned to its original glory, but that probably won’t happen until another harbour crossing happens (and don’t even get me started on that!)
I guess that the one thing which seems to frustrate me is how quickly and easily close to half a billion dollars is being allocated to a roading project, while important public transport projects like integrated ticketing, the ordering of electric trains, the finishing off of important railway stations (and so on, and so forth) continues to be up in the air. Not unexpected, but certainly frustrating.
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