An NZ Herald article today shines light on some growing worries that the “Auckland Manukau Eastern Transport Initiative”, known more commonly as “AMETI” may be a first step to reviving the dreaded “Eastern Motorway” – which Aucklanders resoundingly rejected in the 2004 local government elections. Here’s an extract from the article:

Panmure residents are wondering if a new road through their suburb is the first stage of a revived eastern highway across Hobson Bay to the city.

A $1.33 billion package of eastern suburbs transport works retains all the elements necessary for reviving the eastern highway, Panmure Community Action Group spokesman Keith Sharp said yesterday.

“We wonder if there is any good reason for retaining the hugely expensive trenched option for the north-south route through Panmure when the currently proposed road is supposed to go no further than Glen Innes,” he said.

Mr Sharp produced a 2007 plan for the Ameti (Auckland-Manukau eastern transport initiative) project showing the northern route continuing from Merton Rd in Glen Innes to St Johns Rd in Kohimarama.

“Once at St Johns it’s just over the hill and down the other side to Purewa Creek.”…

…Mr Sharp said too much of the Ameti planning had occurred without genuine public consultation, with all major decisions being made before the public were aware of the implications.

He said planners had been allowed to adapt old plans for the eastern highway to fit Ameti, which were two different projects.

“The eastern highway was designed to link Manukau City with the Auckland CBD. Ameti is intended to facilitate traffic movement into and out of the Tamaki areas of Panmure and Glen Innes.”

The new north-south road would come off the Mt Wellington Highway, go behind the back of the Harvey Norman Centre and through a trench under the Ellerslie-Panmure Highway.

There seems to have been relatively little public debate and involvement in discussions about what form AMETI should take, which is surprising considering its cost is around the same scale as that of the highly controversial and publicly debated Waterview Connection. From my various transport contacts I understand that there’s some pretty large areas of disagreement between the various agencies involved over the form that AMETI should take: whether it has too much of a roads focus, whether there should be a motorway component, whether the bus lanes are enough to justify being called “rapid transit”, whether building massive viaducts is appropriate in the urban environment and so forth.

But the problem is that most of these discussions have taken place behind closed doors – simply between Auckland City Council staff and Manukau City Council staff, with ARTA apparently involved but with there being little sign that public transport is really being taken that seriously by the project. Only very recently was there an open day to show people what was planned for the Panmure stage of the project, but effectively (somewhat typically I must add) it seems to be a case of “here’s what we are going to build, what do you think?” rather than “what do you think needs to happen here?”

The image below is from the open day, and includes a lot of “this road will be built here, this road will be built there”: Perhaps there has been what I would call “micro-level consultation”, over things such as where a bus stop should go, whether a certain road should have two lanes in each direction or just the one lane and so forth. But there still seem to be some fundamental characteristics of AMETI that are truly bizarre.

As I have noted before, the number one utterly bizarre characteristic of AMETI is its complete ignorance of the “big picture” in terms of providing what must be the most glaring missing link in Auckland’s transport system – a rapid transit line to the southeast. The plans note that bus lanes will be provided along the Lagoon Drive and Ellserlie-Panmure Highway corridor, and pretend that constitutes what a Rapid Transit Network should be (which is absolute rubbish, but let’s leave that aside for the moment). However, it appears as though absolutely no thought is going into answering basic questions like the following:

  1. What happens to our Rapid Transit Network once the buses have passed through Panmure on their way to the CBD?
  2. How is the Rapid Transit Network provided on the eastern side of the Panmure Bridge?
  3. Since when did bus lanes constitute an RTN?
  4. Has any thought whatsoever gone into actually providing a decent standard Rapid Transit line to this huge, fast-growing swathe of southeast Auckland?

As I have said time and time again, I really think that the only solution for providing high-quality rapid transit to the southeast part of Auckland that will be of such a standard that people will actually use it, is through constructing a railway line that would actually branch off from the existing Eastern Line just south of Panmure, and approximately follows the route in the map below:

Everyone keeps saying to me “but this route would be horrifically expensive, it’s not on any of the plans at the moment, it’s the stuff of dreams” and justifiably so (it would be expensive and it’s not really planned for at the moment). However, I think that if this railway line was built then it would take enough traffic off the road to make pretty much the whole $1.33 billion AMETI project unnecessary. Furthermore, future projects that are likely to be required such as an upgrade of Te Irirangi Drive to motorway standard (or near it), plus further upgrades to Ti Rakau Drive would also become unnecessary in my opinion. Even if this project cost close to $3 billion to build, it might very well stack up economically because it would render other projects, such as the roadsfest that AMETI seems to be turning into, unnecessary.

It seems to me that AMETI is basically a giant excuse to say to people “hey, we’re trying to do something here” while actually completely ignoring the real problem, the “elephant in the room”, which is the lack of a southeast Rapid Transit route. It’s a depressingly typical Auckland situation where everyone knows what the real problem is, but because it is seen as too difficult, everyone’s just ignoring it and instead building other stuff that will inevitably do little to reduce congestion but most certainly will ruin a fair few local communities with massive roads being cut through their heart.

Perhaps the best thing we can do with AMETI is stall it for a few months and hope that the Auckland Transport CCO does a complete rethink of it, a rethink that stops ignoring the elephant in the room and gets around to providing a real southeast RTN for this part of Auckland.

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8 comments

  1. I saw this story in the paper yesterday and though that it was good people are starting to see through AMETI. By building it in pieces it will become much easier in the future to say “lets complete the missing link to take the road all the way into town”. Perhaps some letters to the editor or an opinion piece about the benefits of putting a rail line through there rather than AMETI

  2. If they actually build these roads as planned there will be huge pressure to build the expressway across Hobsons Bay. How can they say it is ‘dead and buried’ when they are planning to build a six lane arterial from Pakauranga and the Southern motorway up through Panmure and GI? They are just going to leave that highway stopped at a dead end facing a motorway reserve for ever, spilling it’s traffic onto the two lane road that goes up through the GI town centre? Of course not, the second that road is built is the second people start demanding a Glenn Innes Bypass… and once that is built there will be a couple of kilometres of ‘missing link’ to build in order to ‘complete the network’. Gah!

    They did something similar here in Melbourne. The plan to build the M1 freeway through a historic village was shot down by massive public outcry, and the lord mayor decried it ‘dead a buried’. They then went and started building the freeway either side of this link instead! After a year or two of having the entire motorway decant onto their local centre’s main street even the locals were screaming out to have the last bit of the freeway bowled through their neighbourhood!

    Transport policy by a thousand cuts.

  3. “They are just going to leave that highway stopped at a dead end facing a motorway reserve for ever”

    They argue that they are just taking EXISTING traffic out of the Panmure town centre area, which has some truth in it. But of course, with the talk about eventual four laning, the “2 lanes extra from 2020” talk, you may still be right about the potential consequences.

  4. Projects that promise to reduce traffic by building more roads tend to make me very very skeptical. If the new road is to have any effect in reducing traffic through Panmure then those benefits desperately need to be “locked in” by reducing the vehicle capacity of the streets you are wanting to direct traffic away from.

    Otherwise you just induce more and more people to travel.

  5. The more I look at the south eastern rail idea the more I like it, but I think the biggest problem, bigger even than the cost of crossing the Tamaki, is getting past the residents of Farm Cove. They are not going to put up with any kind of infrastructure going through their riverine properties and they’ll be organised and voluble. Furthermore they don’t even get to use the thing without first getting to Highland Park, and they will be car types anyway, you can’t live out there without one. I think the only viable plan is to tunnel all the way from Highland park to GI. And surely this would put the price of the thing up with a harbour crossing? Still believe its worth it but will be hard to find the serious money needed to build it. Could start at the southern end but that too will be politically difficult as for those who currently battle into town in their cars it won’t look like its heading the right way AND many of those in Howick + Pakuranga still hate the idea that they are connected to Manukau at all anyway… tricky. I guess if the new Manukau Station and then electrification are as successful as I think likely the debate could change considerably.

    1. I’ve come to the same conclusion actually, that most (if not all) of that Glen Innes to Highland Park section would need to be tunnelled. Quite a bit could be fairly shallow cut and cover tunnelling underneath Butley Drive, which could save money. There’s also some green space in Glen Innes that could be surface level, although you’d probably want to be ducking down fairly quickly to get below the Tamaki River.

      We’re probably looking at around a 4 kilometre tunnel, which wouldn’t be cheap. I’ve always thought the whole Glen Innes to Manukau route would be in the order of $3 billion.

    2. I have talked to people I know out there and despite it being an area dominated by cars, as soon as you mention it people say something to the effect of “I wish they would build it, I would prefer to use that than having to drive” I think if it was seriously suggested by someone it could get some good support.

      I think what could be a good idea to do is to extend the Manukau trench under SH1 and to Te Iriangi drive, then it will be fairly easy to take it up the middle of the road to get the train to Botany Town centre. Stop there until we work out the best route to get it to the eastern line around GI and I think the local pressure to connect it up will grow pretty quickly.

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