On November 7th the Victoria Park Tunnel will open to traffic – somewhat ironically (given how many motorway projects were built ‘for the Rugby World Cup’) just a few days after a certain tournament finishes. A week before the tunnel opens to traffic though, there will be the ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity to walk through it, on October 29th. NZTA has more details:
The NZ Transport Agency will open two of the Victoria Park Tunnel’s three lanes to traffic on Monday, 7 November, at the end of a week of intensive work to divert northbound motorway lanes underground from the existing Victoria Park flyover.
A week earlier, on 29 October, the Prime Minister, John Key, will officially open the tunnel. This will mark a major milestone in the staged completion of the Victoria Park Tunnel project, which will be the first completed of the Government’s seven roads of national significance prioritised to support New Zealand’s economic growth to open. The public will also have the opportunity to walk through the tunnel, and it will be the venue for a charity gala dinner.
Due to the need to control numbers, you need to register online for tickets for the walk – although they are free.
Saturday, 29 October – Mr Key will lead a ribbon cutting celebration to officially open the tunnel. It will be people, not traffic, who have first use of the tunnel. The ribbon cutting will be followed by a public open day when people will have the chance to walk through the 450 metre-long tunnel.
The NZTA says numbers will be restricted, and people will need to register first before they can make the walk.
“It’s a question of safety,” Mr Parker says. “Space in the tunnel is limited and there are only so many people we can accommodate comfortably at once.”
People who want to make the walk must book first, at http://tunnelwalk.eventbrite.com/
Outside the tunnel, there will be celebrations in Victoria Park which include demonstrations at the Auckland Council’s new skatepark, a walk of art, displays and food stalls
“All these activities have a link to the project and the work done by the NZTA and its project partners and Auckland Council to restore the area after the disruption caused by months of tunnel construction,” Mr Parker adds.
During the week that follows, contractors will be busy with final work to have the tunnel and the motorway approaches to it ready for traffic on 7 November.
I’m quite looking forward to the walk, and also looking forward to the tunnel opening for traffic. Hopefully it should take a bit of extra traffic off streets in the city centre and also off streets around Ponsonby/Herne Bay as people stop avoiding spaghetti junction quite so much.
Processing...
Any word on what is planned for the viaduct to ‘soften’ its impact, I’d like to see soundwalls along its length to minimise noise spillover into the park – that’s one of the major negative effects it has. I find I can sit with my back and ignore the uglu viaduct but the constant hum and clatter of trucks and cars makes the park quite unpleasent in comparison to Western Park, The Domain or Albert Park. Maybe they should also try to make a feature of the bridge through lighting and while it’s quite a different bridge (one with a lot of character c.f. the Viaduct) what they did in Zurich with pop-up shops under an old railway bridge (which is still in use) shows what can be done with otherwise ‘wasted’ space.
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aussersihler_Viadukt
There will be some upgrades to the existing viaduct, but I’m not sure whether sound walls are proposed.
Complete outrage if any money gets spent on the viaducts that shouldn’t still be there; a major justification for the project was that they are supposed to be at the end of their lives due to ‘concrete cancer’… it seems NZTA’s engineers have various different versions of the state of their assets depending on what the political needs are. Appalling that we still have to put up with them in our park… and no amount of flower beds or glass walls will improve this failed half-a-job decision.
I believe it’s all to do with the uncertainty surrounding the proposed new harbour crossing. For either of the main road options (bridge or tunnel) the area where the current viaduct is will probably be used for the southern approach – so the NZTA won’t want to spend much money at this point in replacing or substantially upgrading the viaduct until things are certain. The problem is that the goalposts keep changing with respect to a new harbour crossing – we seem to go from bridge to tunnel and back and forth all the time, depending on who is in charge.
I was recently at a highway design conference in North America and heard from an NZTA colleague that there has been a bit of a push on recently to reconsider the previously discounted SH16 route – i.e tunnels from Grafton Gully to the North Shore. This route has the advantage of getting the Northern Motorway to Southern Motorway through traffic more or less completely away from the CMJ, which has route security advantages over the current proposed corridors.
To my mind if the SH16 option went ahead it may be feasible then to remove the Victoria Park Viaduct completely as the current AHB would no longer need to connect to Spaghetti Junction. The new Victoria park tunnel could then be converted for two way traffic to give access to the Cook and Wellington ramps.
Rodin, that would still be the case with a tunnel on the proposed westerly alignment. The tunnel could carry SH1 between the Shore and the CMJ south and westbound (hopefully with a portal at or south of Wellington St), leaving the AHB connecting to Fanshawe St and to Cook/Wellington via a two way’d Victoria Park Tunnel. Although personally I would like to see Wellington St ramp removed and replaced with a two way link to Cook St alone. This would result in almost no negative impacts at the surface and lots of potential positivles.
With the Grafton Gully option one would have to consider the impact upon the Stanley St/Beach Rd area in the first instance, plus also look at what widening and other works would be needed at the interchange with SH1 at the top of the gully. It might end up being a case of duplicating much of the CMJ on the eastern side only to leave the existing CMJ with unused lanes and ramps… i.e. a lot of expense for no net gain.
Either way a tunnel would be a good outcome for the urban fabric (at least far superior to any bridge option) *if* we discount issues of the extreme costs involved and whether it is actually needed of course. With some decent design we could see not only the viaduct removed, but also a large tract of land between Victoria Park and Wellington St available for redevelopment and reconnection of the city to it’s inner western suburbs. Also with the bridge no longer carrying SH1 the eleven lane monster motorway through St Mary’s bay could be scaled back to a four (or six with bus lanes) lane boulevard, leaving plenty of room for a waterfront linear park with trees, plantings, a cycleway and waterfront promenade.