I have had a brief look at a few of the documents surrounding the release of the latest harbour crossing study and came across a few images of what a new bridge may look like.
First a top down view:
Looks like things get pretty messy at each side where the bridge lands, so lets look at those a bit closer up, here’s the St Marys Bay side (sorry its a bit fuzzy)
Wow the residents of St Marys Bay are not going to like this at all, they seem to want to extend the mess that is the CMJ right down to the waterfront and they seem to forget the whole point of the Victoria Park Tunnel was to try to minimise the impacts the motorway had on the area. What about the North Shore side?
Again an absolute mess of lanes going in all sorts of directions, again I can’t see the local residents being to happy about this.
So what could the new bridge look like? Here is the NZTA’s render of it although they conveniently leave out what it would look like with the existing bridge next to it.
Its ok but hardly unique or that interesting.
Next is a diagram showing how the lane configuration would work, it might seem confusing at first but basically the existing SH1 from the CMJ will carry on to the new crossing meaning it effectively bypasses the traffic entering from the CBD. Traffic to or from the CBD would use the existing bridge and access would be provided by Cook St and Fanshawe St. Pedestrians/cyclists would use the new bridge.
Just for reference here is the same diagram but for the tunnel option, it does look a bit cleaner probably due to most of the new connection being underground however the in this plan the pedestrian/cyclist paths are a shared lane on the city side and the southbound bus lane has to share a lane with general traffic which doesn’t seem ideal.
What ever option is eventually chosen it is pretty clear it will result in a lot of lanes being added to either side of the harbour.
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The one nice thing about the bridge will be full buslanes all the way down to Cook St. At least one upside of the bridge could be the Vis Park tunnel which will compensate for the negative visual effects elsewhere.
I think the best public transport position regarding a second harbour crossing will be agnosticism so olong as we gat a rail tunnel. If were going to have buslanes on the motorway over the bridge it makes a case for any rail link being up the Devenport peninsuila
Errr… The two diagrams are exactly the same.
opps, updated now
Bridge is real tough for the people on Northcote Point. And the cityside alignment looks like it is all about not affecting the new developments at the Tank Farm, tough for St Mary’s Bay too.
Two bridges on two different angles, two different heights and two different designs.
Great way to destroy Auckland’s harbour.
Destroy? Multiple bridges of different designs is fairly common… Brisbane River, the Thames through central London, the Forth, the Yarra, San Francisco Bay, New York harbour, the Hudson River, the East River, or the two Severn crossings. None of these are destroyed, although I’m not so keen on a few of the individual bridges (such as the hideous Forth Rail Bridge).
To me its not that the bridges are different designs but that they are right next to each other. If we were happening to build a bridge from say Devonport to Mechanics Bay then there wouldn’t be an issue as it is a completely different part of the Harbour e.g. San Francisco wouldn’t go and build another bridge on effectively the same alignment as the Golden Gate bridge, New Yorks bridges are generally a couple of Km’s apart.
There is a point on the Yarra where there are four bridges in about 500m. They’re all radically different and at different heights. Has it destroyed Melbourne? Not in my opinion. Nor do seven bridges in 800m across the Tyne destroy Newcastle, or the 31 bridges across the Thames destroy London.
Buildings also generally have different designs even though they are right next to each other. I don’t think that destroys a city either, and the alternative (such as the hundreds of identical Soviet-era apartment blocks in East Berlin) is generally pretty awful.
The conceptual cable stayed bridge pictured looks cool. Much better than the current grim steel bridge. There may be proximity effects with airflow if they’re proposing an airfoil deck, but engineers will be able to model and manage the impact. I think the triangle topology is quite dramatic. I’d shoot for a second cable stayed bridge, a tunnel for rail, and replacement of the current bridge by a tunnel in the distant future once it is completely worn out.
Obi, I agree that ‘destroy’ is far too strong, and anyway the harbour will be fine with another bridge…. nothing could be any more desultory than the existing sorry excuse for a structure. It’s where the bridge is proposed to meet its connections that it will be vile, both at Northcote, but especially at the city end. Rather reduces the point of undergrounding the lead up to the crossing….. I am pleased that NZTA or the politicians now seem to accept that multilane motorways are hideous things and are prepared to bury them, now all we need to do is to get them to accept that this is, indeed, form following function and that they look hideous because they are hideous. And we should only ever build more as a last resort….
The good thing about these goons wanting a bridge is that it will delay the whole thing which hopefully will allow sense to prevail and personell to change….
I think the cable stayed design is awful, looks like a nasty rehash of Melbourne’s Westgate bridge to go next to our nasty rehash of the Syndney harbour bridge.
It would end up looking a lot like this:
http://mtag.org.au/NEWS/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Westgate-Bridge.jpg
http://www.eng.unimelb.edu.au/research/themes/projects/sustainable_systems/images/high_precision.jpg
Yeah Nick agreed, but surely we would actually get a designer involved not just a couple engineers at Beca…..please….. I guess not with NZTA and Joyce driving it, gawd.
Bridges crossing a 3km harbour have a totally different effect from bridges a few hundred metres long crossing a river. Those bridges crossing the Yarra do not dominate the views of the city, like the existing and potential bridged will.
Bridges that truely are great architectural statements cost good money and I bet they haven’t priced that into their dodgy calcs. The costings will be based on a cheap as chips model.
I agree Luke, there is a big difference between a series of low level bridges over a narrow river and two massive harbour bridges next to each other. Most of the bridges on the Yarra are barely 5m above the waterline and about 60m long, not 50m tall edifices that stretch for kilometres across the crowning jewel of our city.
Imagine if Sydney had built a concrete motorway bridge a few dozen metres away from the existing one, instead of their harbour tunnel!
You nailed it. In two short sentences. If we spent all the money that has gone on Harbour Crossing studies in the last 20 years in the building of the tunnel they come up with we’d be twenty five percent of the way across now.
Hmmm. Maybe we should take spades down to Wynyard and start it off for free. I’ll do a couple of hours if you will…
This is insane. These people cant be serious. A tunnel will surely come out on top in any calculations due to the environmental effects of this ridiculous second bridge.
This is just depressing. It’s becoming more apparent, Joyce does not give a rat’s arse about Auckland as a city or the people in it. His only concern is how to move trucks through it.
Bridge or Tunnel I don’t see the point in connecting at Onewa at all. Any new road crossing is essentially a SH1 by-pass. It will take the bulk of the traffic out of this intersection so surely it is more than able to handle the local flows and all traffic, as it does now, for the existing bridge. Sure this would mean Birkenhead drivers heading south of the city would need to connect to SH1 at Akoranga or Northcote but wouldn’t this be a good thing at peak times as there then would be a variety of different flows in different directions rather than everyone driving down Onewa Rd say in the morning?
A tunnel surfacing at only Akoranga would be so much less disruptive and a whole lot cheaper than rebuilding Onewa in the complicated fashion above and way better for the poor locals. Anyway they’ve just rebuilt this thing, is there no limit to how many times they feel they need to do over every part of the system? Proof that it is a perpetual make work scheme and never any kind of solution to travel in AK.
But anyway I don’t believe in any kind of road crossing, especially when SH18 + SH20 come on line, and we see how many people still want to drive in 2012 given where I believe the oil price is heading. Quietly keep planning for the rail crossing only and the incremental conversion of the Busway served by local feeder buses.
You are talking about an extra 1.5km of tunnel to get to Akoranga though Patrick, that won’t come cheap.
I don’t see the need for the massive interchange at Onewa anyway. Surely it would be simpler to widen the motorway to ten lanes from Akoranga (i.e. one more each way), having the centre six enter the tunnel portal just before Onewa intechange while the outer four carry on to the Bridge. From Onewa iself you would need to add a second pair of ramps direct to the tunnel in a couple of cut and cover structures, while the existing ramps connect to the bridge/CBD. The only addition needed would be a one lane flyover for the northbound busway.
Personally I can see some value in this project, particularly as it allows a major downgrading of the effects on the watefront and the CBD. Instead of a nine lane motorway along the waterfront,through our park, and in a trench barrier severing the western side of the CBD; we could have a mere six lane boulevard resembling something like Tamaki Drive on the waterfront and all teh motorway underground as far as the Wellington St bridge (which with a little decking over would simply become Wellington St).
However, five billion bucks to tidy up the waterfront is quite a price, although there are other benefits like creating a SH1 bypass and separating out city commuter traffic.
It’s just too much and anyway it’s clear with the way they released it it’s main job is to suck all the oxygen out of other people’s projects…. especially rail projects of course. Daft though; why are they so threatened by a bit of balance? why soooo greedy for their pet mode- afraid that the other thing might take off? Well too late; it has.
If oil keeps the way it going I honestly don’t think it will ever get to the point of more road lanes being built…
A rail tunnel perhaps when the Northern Busway hits capacity…
I’ve just used the Westgate bridge as a model in Google Earth to seem what two bridges might look like in Auckland:
http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/From-Wynyard-point-park.gif
http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/From-devonport.gif
http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/From-St-Marys.gif
Those are great Nick, gives a good idea of the scale, etc. worth putting into a post of their own…
Yes great work Nick.
OMG having two bridges would look horrible.
I dont understand why this has all come back up again? I thought they had decided on tunnels ages ago as the preferred option? Is Mr Joyce dictating again?
I look forward to seeing pedestrians and cyclists being able to travel from the shore to city
Build a rail tunnel first and then the car tunnels. Watch how Auckland changes with less cars coming into the city.
Great to see this article on the Granny website http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10716992 Showing that as Mike Lee says, the people are way out ahead of the idiots in charge.
But note that Joyce is working the gold plated ridiculous North Shore Rail scheme angle, so that’s what that report was designed to achieve obviously….