Sorting out Warkworth

Now that the $400 million Orewa-Puhoi Motorway has been shown to have done nothing to alleviate congestion north of Auckland (instead it has simply shifted the bottleneck from Orewa to Warkworth), it seems like there is quite a lot of talk about what should be done about this problem. As I explained a week or so ago, one solution could simply be for everyone to not drive at the same time, but if we are to spend a lot of money to “do something” about the bottlenecks north of Auckland, I really think that we should potentially look a bit outside the square for a solution. I also think that it’s truly bizarre that NZTA are widening State Highway 1 through Warkworth at the same time as having plans to bypass the town.

Further north there is a potentially useful template for what could be done around Warkworth, and that is the way in which Wellsford is progressively being bypassed – not through some grand massively expensive state highway bypass, but instead through a simple local road upgrade a decent chunk of the vehicles that used to pass through there to get to Mangawhai Heads, Langs Beach and potentially even Waipu Cove, now have an alternative route to use and don’t have to go through Wellsford. The roads have always been there, but over the past few years they have been fully sealed, and slowly the signage has been improved to encourage more and more people to take this route. I think that once a proposed improvement to the intersection with State Highway 1 is constructed, this will become the main route to that part of the coast.

The map below shows a comparison of the old route (red) and the new one (blue). As a bonus, the new route shaves around 5 minutes off the travel time, even off-peak:

Unfortunately there’s not such an obvious bypass route for Warkworth, although the potential is there as I discovered during a rather interesting detour on our way up north a few days back. As shown in the map below, at the moment if one is to bypass Warkworth (the blue route) then the route is a pretty arduous one (particularly as a reasonable chunk of it is unsealed). If that route was completely sealed then I guess it could be a useful overflow point if things are particularly nasty, but during off-peak times it’s probably going to take about three or four times as long as sticking to SH1.

The green route in the map below shows a potentially much shorter bypass of Warkworth, once again using existing roads (except for the short dotted area which would need to be built). Unless there’s a huge mountain where the dotted line is (which there may well be around there), then I think building this bypass would basically achieve what we need: a good alternative route to the state highway that runs through the town.

Instead of a fairly logical and simple solution, such as this, we are seeing a two-pronged approach from NZTA: firstly to widen SH1 through Warkworth to four-lanes, and secondly to build an unbelievably expensive full motorway bypass from Puhoi to Wellsford – the infamous “holiday highway”.

Here are NZTA’s plans for widening the road through Warkworth:

So instead of a relatively inexpensive solution, we have one project that will cut Warkworth in half with a wide high-speed road through the middle of it, and then we have a super-expensive motorway option that is likely to have a cost-benefit ratio of barely 0.3 (not that that will necessarily stop it from happening). I guess that a modest proposal like my suggested bypass route wouldn’t get as many headlines as the “roads of national significance”. Which just shows where transport thinking is heading.

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