Waterview Connection – submissions open

A week or so ago the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notified NZTA’s application for consent to build the Waterview Connection and to widen State Highway 16. Submissions are now open until October 15th. It’s possible to download a submission form here, and then email it to both waterview@epa.govt.nz and waterview.connection@nzta.govt.nz. There are effectively two parts to the project: the Waterview Connection, which links the Mt Roskill end of State Highway 20 with the existing Northwest Motorway (SH16) and also a significant widening of State Highway 16. All up the two projects will cost around $2 billion – by far New Zealand’s largest ever transport project. Here’s an aerial photo of where significant parts of the project will be located: The documentation that has been prepared by NZTA is pretty massive, and really needs some breaking down in order to make sense out of it. We have:

1. A general overview of the proposal – including all the application forms. This is a pretty boring section that isn’t really worth reading.
2. The various assessments of effects. A lot of this is either quite technical, or a summary of the various specialist reports that I will mention later.
3. The plans, maps and diagrams. There is a huge amount of information here, though some of the more interesting plans include operational scheme plans (keep an eye out for the green bus shoulder lanes and how they abruptly end at every onramp and offramp), a plan of the rail alignment and how it is being protected and some of the urban design and landscaping plans (though they are pretty big files!)
4. The specialist reports. Here is where the real grunt work behind the application lies, with a large number of specialist reports being prepared. Perhaps of most interest to readers of this blog will be the transport assessment and the traffic modelling information.

I have blogged extensively on both the Waterview Connection and the SH16 widening in the past – and I’m pretty familiar with the project due to the various iterations it went through last year. One particularly interesting aspect of the documentation is the transport assessment, and how it addresses what is my main remaining issue with the project – and that is whether widening State Highway 16 is a complete waste of money because it will just “induce” traffic and quickly become congested again (just like what has happened with every other motorway widening project in the history of Auckland).

While the transport assessment is over 180 pages long and requires some serious effort to read through (something I certainly haven’t done in any detail). It has a very useful summary of the findings – in particular on the matter relating to whether widening SH16 will actually have long term benefits or not. To start with, it is worth noting the transport benefits the project will almost certainly have – particularly on the local road network that through-traffic will now be able to avoid: In order to realise many of the benefits to Great North Road, Carrington Road and Mt Albert Road it will be necessary to reallocate some of the road space to more “people friendly” uses – such as bus lanes, footpaths, cycleways and so forth. It will be interesting to see whether this happens or not, as both NZTA and Auckland City Council seem to have been pointing fingers at each other saying “your problem” over these matters for the last couple of years.

Getting on to the traffic effects on the actual motorways themselves, it’s a little bit wordy – but well worth having a dig through: In short, we see the motorway widening inducing an additional 25-35% of peak hour traffic by 2026 than was the case in 2006 (I do wonder what the “do nothing” for 2026 is – might have to have a dig through the documentation). That’s a quite significant amount of extra traffic that will need to get to and from the motorway along arterial roads that are generally around capacity at the moment. Looking at the peak hour eastbound direction (AM peak), it seems that there will be a slight improvement in travel times compared to the 2006 baseline. But for the peak hour westbound direction (PM peak), traffic in 2026 will actually be more congested than it is now – even though much of the westbound motorway will be widened from three lanes to five lanes. It seems that NZTA have finally acknowledged that widening motorways does not fix congestion. (Actually perhaps not, they’re still proceeding with the project).

The cost of the SH16 upgrade is not insignificant. When the whole Westgate to Western Springs widening is added up, an NZ Herald article from last year suggested that the cost would be $860 million. That seems an awfully huge amount of money to spend on a project that seems like it won’t actually make things much better at all.

The public transport benefits of the project are talked up a bit in the section below – and sure there will be some benefit from the longer bus shoulder lanes. But it’s pretty marginal compared with the project as a whole – perhaps a million or two out of the $2 billion budget. I look forward to seeing how the public submission process, and the eventual Board of Inquiry hearing proceeds. It feels like it has been so long in the “preliminary” stages of this project that it’s quite hard to believe we’re actually now right in the middle of the actual submissions process.

In general, I find myself probably supporting the SH20 section on balance – as it should take significant pressure of SH1, should take traffic away from local streets (as long as we reallocate road space to ensure the streets don’t fill themselves up again) and will “complete the motorway network”. However, with the SH16 section, while I can understand one additional westbound lane (to avoid a merging nightmare between SH20 and SH16), the massive widening of the motorway seems completely pointless – as NZTA’s own traffic analysis shows that it will make little or no difference to congestion in the longer-run. Surely a big chunk of that $860 million could be spent more usefully elsewhere?

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