Not to focus too much on Wellington as this is an Auckland Transport Blog, however decisions made around the country give an insight into what we can expect in Auckland.
Here is what’s in store for Wellington Central, as part of the Wellington Airport to Levin road of National significance announcement:
Yup, that’s the good old Basin Reserve cricket ground (heritage listed by the way), with a flyover right next to it. I’d hope if anything like this was proposed for Auckland all readers of this blog would put on their activist hats. The time for flyovers through downtown areas has passed.
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Thats not as bad as I thought it would be although I can think of better things to spend the money on. At least its no Victoria park with the flyover stradling it.
Did you expect it to go over the middle of the ground..?
Wouldn’t have suprised me
Wow, that is such a poor and amateur use of SketchUp.
Yes, I’m not sure of it’s original source but gives an idea of what is to come…
The pictures have been thrown together to give people an idea of what the Basin Fly over will look like. They have been totally disregarded by NZTA as they don’t even come close to following the design standards for roads. So I guess they will provide us with something more. I think the pictures have something to do with the save the basin trust: http://savethebasin.org.nz/
This project has to be my no1 hated project. As someone from Wellington, who loves cricket and interested in better transport solutions, it manages to top the list. I just cannot understand why we would tarnish our world wide repretation with the lovely site of a flyover. Cricket fans all around the world know the Basin, that’s what they know about Wellington. There are probably hundreds of million of Indians, Pakistanians, South Africans and English people who know only know of Wellington because of the Basin Reserve. I’ve been lucky enough to go to many a match there and enjoy the sun and the cricket, but cannot imagine what kind of a place it will be once a road is built, which will shadow the ground.
I hope there is major opposition to this project, with those in Te Aro who protested for the inner city bypass and cricket loves all around Wellington, NZ and the world.
Well I’m a huge cricket fan and big opponent of urban fabric destroying, 1960s-type road solutions – so yeah, that one is pretty close to the top of my list too I think.
@Brent, that’s is where I got the images from I didn’t realise they’d created them…
This is the very worst part of the project, while the Transmission Gully and Northern bypasses are poor spending and will encourage urban sprawl that is a case of nothing new in NZ, however we really need to get past building downtown flyovers, the Yanks have ripped out (or are in the process of ripping out) ones in Portland, Seattle, San Fran and Boston, why are we planning on building more..?
Totally agree with the comments above: as someone who lived in Wellington for seven years, it’s ludicrous to suggest that the few seconds of travel time saved by this expensive and monumentally ugly flyover will outweigh the drastic damage it will do to the cricket-watching experience at the Basin Reserve. But it’s only New Zealand’s best cricket venue – nothing worth protecting, right? The sad fact is that the lack of public interest in the plans will mean that the stupidity of the scheme will only be recognised once it’s too late to stop it, and then Wellington will be stuck with it. Just think of the publicity for Wellington every time a test match is played at the Basin – the commentators will spend the entire day pointing out to NZ and overseas viewers just how ignorant the planners were and how the city has spoiled a great sporting institution.
I can just hear Blowers (English cricket commentator Henry Blofield) talking us through a match at the post-National party Basin Reserve now:
‘Iain O’Brien, fresh back from his retirement now that his wife Rosie has had her work visa sorted by Taito Philip Field, is starting his run up into the wind and …. oh my dear old fellow, look at the seagull drifting up over the embankment without a care in the … oh dear, that lovely seagull – the one with a red beak – appears to have been consumed by the radiator of a diesel lorry taking frozen NZ lamb to the airport to acquire a few food miles on it’s way to a dinner table in Dorset. The lorry was doing 70mph on the flyover that shades one end of the wicket, which has helped O’Brien take 7 wickets with the variable heating of the wicket, don’t you know?
Back to the cricket, chaps; Daniel Vettori just won the test, and has passed out, suffering from asphixiation as the presentation podium was too close to the Steven Joyce memorial SH1 flyover. Incidentally, for our foreign listeners, former Motorways Minister Joyce was buried at the base of the first flyover column by those terribly hasty Kiwi public transport advocates – apparently they thought his batting average was below par. Can’t be helped, I suppose. I wonder if that seagull will be served for lunch in some delectable form?’
I’m no longer sure I’m joking.
This project will be ‘called in’ using the 2009 amendment to the RMA, which from what I understand means there will be no public debate or review process it will go ahead whether anyone but Joyce likes it or not.
It is ugly, don’t doubt that. So what are the alternatives to separating the traffic flows? Leave the congestion as is? How can we improve the PT options?
If this has to be built, at the very least dig a tunnel, doing anything else is downright scandalous. I’d say enhancing PT to the airport and surrounding suburbs would be easily done through either through a tram or subway line. How about submerging both and actually doing something positive. Traffic will be back to where it is a couple of years after opening and the next National government will probably build a double carriage way.
We shouldn’t forget that Alexandra Park will likely also be cut in half with a flyover with the looks of it too.
When will they be replacing it with a tunnel?
@subria, if you have a look at the greens Wellington public transport plan they have a costed proposal for expanding light rail out from the Wellington Central station, a couple hundred million from memory…
And on it goes. Joyce continues to pay lip service to other modes and portratys himself as a pragmatisit while his actions show him up to be a 1950s motorways fetishist of the worst kind.
Sad thing is there are a lot of poeple out there who think Joyce is doing a bang up job because he’s fast tracked so many motorway projects. Things is anyone could do that if they suck all the money out of other modes (walking, cycling, local roads and PT) and pour it all into motorways.
A tunnel either can’t be built (or would be extremely expensive) because the Basin was wetlands at one stage and the ground underneath is all mush. Or something.
The roundabout around the Basin is so congested because SH1 intersects with the main road between the CBD and Newtown and the southern suburbs. There is no predominant flow. There is almost no chance of getting future postulated light rail through the area without doing some deconfliction of the traffic flows first. This improves SH1 traffic flow (and also traffic to Newtown), but is also a pre-requisite for public transport improvements.
It’s ugly. But I don’t see any realistic alternative. And a city where noone drives a car anywhere isn’t realistic, in my book.
Gee, Auckland spends $400 million to build a tunnel under Victoria park rather than another horrible viaduct, and here goes Wellington building exactly the thing we are trying to get rid of!
Obi, if Auckland can tunnel under Victoria park (which is a landfill reclaimation of mudflats past the natural shoreline) Wellington can go under the Basin Reserve.
Yes I agree Nick, the Basin has been drained constantly for 140 years, I dont there would be more problems than the VPT…
Richard Maclean (who works for WCC and comments regularly about urban issues at Eye of the Fish) has posted a comprehensive comment about the flyover at: http://www.thestandard.org.nz/basin-reserve-flyover/
He starts:
“The people opposing the proposed flyover are employing the classic old ruse of working up drawing to make the proposal look as terrifying and gigantic as possible. The artist who knocked out the image you’re running has clearly decided the flyover is going to be designed by Mattel – ie that it’ll be a giant Hot Wheels track that’ll cross over the fence into the Basin Reserve itself. This, of course, is all rubbish designed specifically to mislead the public and scare the horses.”
In early days I thought this project would be dropped as flyovers in the urban environment destroy neighbourhoods. But surprisingly it just keeps gaining momentum. The craziest thing about this project is that it has support form WCC councilor and former NZ cricket international John Morrison, who also heads up the Basin Reserve Trust. I’m not sure if he (and the rest of Wellington) understand the implementations to this flyover going in over the Basin.
Wellington has had test cricket for years, when other cities have struggled to seal matches in their city due to venues. This is true for Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin. In recent years, Christchurch and Dunedin have spent a significant amount of money on their cricket grounds so they can get test cricket played in their city. This has enabled Dunedin’s university oval to be used as a ground in recent years and Hagely oval in Christchurch seeking to follow the same course. But Wellington’s Basin my be lost to test cricket as the characteristics of the venue will change once a motorway flyover is constructed over the top of the ground.
Maybe if Auckland gets their act together in terms of a Test cricket venue, the Wellington matches will be up for grabs.
Nick R – remember the flyover will still exist in Auckland over Victoria park due to the gradient that would be faced by southbound traffic from coming out of a tunnel up to spaghetti junction. The tunnel is only for northbound traffic.
That is true for the time being Matt, but the other serious alternative was to duplicate the flyover to eight lanes, which was quashed by public outcry (a full tunnel was just to expensive). The current option is something of a trade off, the new link will be in tunnel while the old link will stay for up to 20 more years until the structure is beyond it’s usefull life, then it will be demolished and possibly replaced with a second tunnel.
Right now it appears that we may be free of the monstrosity a little sooner. If the harbour tunnel project goes ahead SH1 willlargely bypass this area and the flyover will be demolished. The soon to be built Vic Park Tunnel will be sufficient capacity to link the harbour bridge with midtown (the harbour bridge would no longer carry any though traffic, just to downtown and midtown).
MattL – Wrong, the vic park flyover will be removed with another stage later, never had gradient problems just not enough money to do all at once.
There is a public transport element to this project – they are doubling the sizes of the Mt Vic tunnels to cater for more buses.
Anyway this doesn’t seem too bad, frankly. The fact that it takes as long to get to Wellington Airport by car as it does in Auckland is testament to the atrocious layout of central Wellington, its roads and its average public transport network. This saves more than “a few seconds” and, I believe, reduces the strength of the argument to relocate Wellington’s airport to a northern, coastal locale (Paraparaumu, for instance). There are wider considerations at stake here.
Sure a rail connection to the airport would be great, but fiscal erality has to kick in somewhere. Auckland has a motorway conenction to its airport and thank god for that (no more Ho Chi Minh trail through the burbs), even though it is only 70% complete – can’t wait for it to link up to SH1.
Christopher, the new tunnels have got nothing to do with catering for more buses. Buses have their own tunnel, the former tram tunnel, which gives them a relatively congestion-free route (until they hit the Golden Mile, but that’s another story). The only possible public transport element is improving north-south flow, and that could easily and cheaply be done with bus lanes – the capacity to do that is already there.
And it’s complete fiction that it takes as long to get to Wellington’s airport by car as it does in Auckland – where on earth did this bizarre conception come from?
And there is no argument to relocate Wellington airport, to Paraparaumu or anywhere else. No-one is proposing it, least of all the owners of either Wellington or Paraparaumu airports.
The southbound gradient is something of a problem, in so far as it would make the southbound tunnel a lot more expensive (but not impossible) to build to modern design standards than the northbound one. Hence the compromise outcome.
It is slightly harder but the design has been made so the additional tunnel can be laid at a latter point in time. The plan is actually construct it in stages so the whole system is underground, the main reason to do it in stages is because, to build a 8 lane tunnel we would have to demolish the flyover before starting construction therefore making it unpractical, however it also has the advantages of waiting between stages and saving some money to do the next stage.
Yeah, so it works out a lot cheaper this way, and the flyover is an old structure with an old design. Apparently it won’t last more than about 20 more years at the most… so some time it will have to come down.
I think the best thing is to progress the harbour crossing project which would negate the need for the southbound tunnel, otherwise I expect the viaduct would be there until the very end of it’s life.
It would certainly be nice to reunite the two parts of Victoria Park. Inner-city parks are utterly precious.
I run around the Vic Park Flyover and regularly see them checking the underside for concrete cancer…
The big difference between the Basin Flyover and Vic Park flyover is that potentially 1 billion cricket loving Indians are going to be looking at how dumb NZ planners are. This is one are Auckland is showing up Wellington in, in terms of transport and visual environments.
@Christoper- the public transport elements are thrown in there so people without a brain will think think- hey this project will benefit us all. Remember there is another ‘Bus Only’ tunnel that all buses travel under to get through the tunnel. They have also been saying this project will split PT and towards hospital with SH1 traffic, but if that’s the case, why don’t they just look at a cut and cover underneath the Basin for buses only? It would be cheaper and benefit all bus services, (probably achieving the same goal). As the roads are already 2-3 and 4 lanes all the way around, there are currently no congestion choke points at the Basin itself, the tunnels are the problem.
Jeremy, there’s a great story about concrete cancer that my Dad once told me. When he was at university I think CMJ was partly completed and the southern motorway began (heading southwards) at the Wellesley/Symonds Street exit/entrance to the motorway. Anyway, apparently as a bit of a student “stunt” one night one rather cheeky student got a black paint brush, or crayon or something and drew giant cracks on the under-side of one of the bridges over SH1 (probably Grafton Road).
The story goes (apparently it is true!) that the road engineers sighted these supposed cracks and were extremely concerned about them, as at that stage the bridge was probably quite new. Supposedly it took many months of checking calculations and (I suppose eventually) checking up close to determine that the cracks were a hoax.
@Mike – the notion that it can take as long to get to the airport in Wellington as it does in Auckland is from two years of commuting every fortnight between the two cities. 35 mins was about normal for Auckland CBD to the airport at around 6pm in a taxi. Once you got past the mess of the CBD and trudging down Manukau Road, SH20 was usually smooth sailing. And in the last year, the congestion in Wellington has made the average hike from Bowen Street to the airport about 30 minutes. How is this tolerable?
I can assure you there has been serious (informal) discussion for developing an alternative airport north of Wellington over the past four years. Primarily to give Wellington a decent length runway and remove the oh-so-familiar weather element from flight operations. Infratil has a strong lobby effort though, so have managed to quell murmurings for the time being (along with the GFC and a generally unreceptive new government).
I haven’t been in on the chatter of late as I’ve relocated to Australia, but last I heard the $450 million upgrade to Paraparaumu Airport was still going ahead. Just the beginning, really.
A mate at my work’s Dad was an Army Engineer who worked on the original CMJ, apparently he lives in Perth now and is in his late 80s and when mate told him about the CMJ upgrade he said, “I told those idiots they’d need those ramps”… LOL, our politicans don’t learn…