Proposed Auckland highway 'needs to be double the width' - Council

The proposed bridge over the Weiti River to connect Whangaparoa to State Highway 1. Photo / Supplied via Auckland Council

Auckland Transport has told planning commissioners it needs to double the width of a proposed highway to Whangaparaoa Peninsula - despite having no immediate funding for the $387 million project.

Although the long-envisaged Penlink scheme fell out of Auckland Council's 10-year budget, its transport agency still hopes to attract private investors within that time-frame to develop it as a tolled shortcut to the peninsula from the Northern Motorway at Redvale, via a bridge over the Weiti River and Stillwater.

The organisation said at the opening of a hearing in Orewa yesterday that it need to develop the 7km highway as a four-lane tolled road to ease severe traffic congestion along the peninsula and cater for population growth through a wider catchment including Silverdale and Dairy Flat.

It wants to include in the project a bridge 540m long and 40m above the Weiti River.

A designation for a two-lane highway and three-lane bridge was issued in 2001, but expires in February unless the four-member hearings panel approves an application to extend it for 20 years and add what Auckland Transport says are small areas of land.

The Hibiscus and Bays Local Board shared the disappointment of many Whangaparaoa residents when Auckland Council dropped the project from its long-term plan, but opponents say it is too grandiose for an area which has already been largely developed and fear it will harm sensitive ecology on both sides of the river.

Even Auckland Transport's landscape architect consultant, Shannon Bray, acknowledges in evidence prepared for the three-day hearing that the bridge "will fundamentally affect the character of the Stillwater area" and become a prominent visible feature above the Weiti estuary.

But he says that the original design was approved after extensive community consultation, and adding another lane with 2.5m shoulders for cyclists will have little extra visual impact.

Project director Theunis van Schalkwyk told the hearing that many Hibiscus Coast, Silverdale and Redvale residents relied on daily trips out of the area for work.

An Auckland Transport business case in 2013 said 30,000 vehicles used the largely two-lane Whangaparaoa Rd daily.

Putting the cost of a four-lane highway at $387.5 million, it estimated total lifetime benefits at $743 million and warned of peak-hour trips from Whangaparaoa to Redvale lengthening from 20 minutes to more than 55 minutes by 2041 without the new link.

Mr van Schalkwyk said the project would also ease congestion along the Hibiscus Coast highway.

Even so, opponents who made submissions for the hearing have outnumbered supporters two to one.

They include 13 residents of Cedar Terrace just below where the new highway would join Whangaparaoa Rd, who submitted there was limited bare land left for housing on the peninsula east of them and the two-lane road already designated would cater for any extra growth.