Alarm over length of road closure

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Traffic chaos which spread across the Auckland Harbour Bridge and through the North Shore yesterday has raised alarm over the time crash investigators took to reopen a key route.

Disruption to peak traffic cascaded almost 20km up the Northern Motorway past Oteha Valley Rd after the critical Fanshawe St entry to Auckland City was closed to traffic until 9.15am - four hours after a serious pre-dawn car smash.

Many North Shore feeder roads were clogged with vehicles inching their way to the motorway, causing thousands of commuters to start the working week more than an hour late.

North Shore Mayor George Wood intends complaining to the police and Transit NZ over the lengthy closure of the Fanshawe St motorway on- and off-ramps, portals for almost 30 per cent of daily traffic to and from the bridge.

"That is just not acceptable in the country's biggest city," said Mr Wood.

"We can't afford to have a key corridor shut down like that for that amount of time - and I don't believe crash scene examinations need to take that long and cause that much disruption if they are managed properly."

But Auckland City Mayor John Banks denies the debacle throws doubt on the region's ability to cope with the planned closure of the same link for more than 3 1/2 days of V8 races for each of seven years from April 2006.

"It does not make sense to somehow implicate the V8 street race with that terrible crash on Fanshawe St," he said. "We are giving commuters two years' notice with an extensive communications campaign and the provision of alternatives."

The head of the Auckland police crash investigation unit, Sergeant Sandy Beckett, said his staff were keenly aware of a need to balance public inconvenience with a need to gather reliable and accurate evidence after a potentially fatal road crash.

He rejected a suggestion by Transit NZ that he should have used a new 3-D imaging machine the agency had supplied for speedier motorway crash probes, saying he did not have enough faith in its accuracy over standard surveying equipment.

The cause of the disruption was a two-car collision at the intersection of Fanshawe and Beaumont streets next to Victoria Park. Firefighters cut a middle-aged man out of his vehicle after it was propelled into a tree 60m away and burst into flames.

A motorist helped police before firefighters arrived by turning an extinguisher on the blaze. The man was taken to Auckland Hospital with critical injuries.

Occupants of the other vehicle, travelling from the motorway, were uninjured.

Some commuters took two hours to get to Auckland from North Shore suburbs.

Buses were diverted through Ponsonby, at a crawl for much of the way in a foretaste to residents and businesses of hosting an alternative traffic route during the V8 races.

The Auckland City Council says it will encourage people to work from home or take advantage of extra buses and ferries during the races.