Here is a look at part of the Wellington Urban Motorway:
So why am I showing a relatively boring part of the Wellington Urban Motorway? Well where this section of motorway is used to be 3,700 graves. They were dug up in the 1960s to make way because the time savings were too great to pass up. Even the late, great Alexander Turnbull wasn’t spared.
Maybe it was very wise to build this, I don’t know I’m not a Wellingtonian (I’m sure Roading Engineers would say it is a smashing success) but surely it should give us some pause when considering current SH project’s social and environmental costs and whether there are better alternatives.
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This road was built in preparation for Steven Joyce to complete a expressway through the city. Until then, I guess for now, the bus and train services will do.
I used to always think, at least one city in NZ got it more or less right and has a decent PT system and isn’t hemmed in by motorways, not sure how much longer I can say that about NZ.
Looks like fantastic time savings. It’s almost completely empty. what’s the vehicle count by the way? 3 or 4 and hour 🙂
Well they only ever half finished the urban motorway, so those time savings never quite got there. 😉
I wonder if there has ever been any goulish encounters along this section of motorway..?
The CMJ in Auckalnd is the same I believe, they had to move half of the graveyard at up by K Rd/Symonds St to make way for it.
Yup you’re right Matt. The Symonds Street cemetery was half-destroyed by the various motorways that have been rammed through there over the years.
Not to mention housing for about 60,000 people and completely trashing the K Rd shopping strip helping to turn it into a red light district.
Man you’ve gotta love 1960’s road decisions.
There are really only two viable routes for traffic traversing the CBD:
1. Motorway and bypass.
2. Along the waterfront.
Option 2 cuts the city off from the waterfront. The waterfront route is already busy and could do with reduced traffic flows rather than dumping a whole motorway worth of traffic on to it. On a fine day, half the population is out on the waterfront, walking, cycling, rollerblading, jogging, or dog walking. On the other hand, there is still a lot of cemetery left (including all the relocated graves) and it is usually pretty quiet. So I’m all in favour of diverting traffic away from the waterfront and the gully with the cemetery was the only reasonable route.
Ideally, everyone wanting to travel from one side of the CBD would take a train and change to a bus. Or a bus, a train, and another bus if you don’t live near a train station. But in the real world, most people just aren’t going to do that.
imagine if the money put into the Wellington bypass was put into big improvements to PT instead. The city would have developed differently and overall congestion would have been lower.