Brian Rudman: State Highway 20 still has to wend a tricky constituency

And now for the trickiest bit of State Highway 20 - the final gasp that runs through Prime Minister Helen Clark's Mt Albert electorate.

Tomorrow, Auckland City councillors have their tuppence-worth, egged on by Mayor Dick Hubbard, who wants the road ready for the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

But I suspect the embarrassing battle to protect Mt Roskill during the designing of the previous stretch of the highway has left a deeper impression on Transit New Zealand road designers and their Auckland City equivalents than anything the councillors or the local MP might say over the next few days.

Before Mt Roskill blew up in their faces, the road builders saw nothing wrong with bulldozing through the side of a landmark volcano.

For this last stage of the highway the road builders seem to have absorbed the lessons of that fiasco, concerning themselves with conserving green spaces and even a minor waterfall. And rightly so.

As for money, well with $1.15 billion being waved about, that seems to be no object in the drive to protect, as best one can, the surrounding neighbourhood from the intrusive effects of a motorway.

Auckland City officials, having supported Transit New Zealand's preference for connecting SH20 with the Northwestern Motorway at Waterview rather than the costlier, $1.55 billion, Rosebank Peninsula alternative, are pushing for environmentally friendly alterations to the scheme.

Transit's basic plan is one anyone picking up a street map would come up with. Draw a line from the end point of the Mt Roskill section of SH20 at Richardson Rd and just follow the parks marked green, the valley of Oakley Creek in fact, from Hendon Park across New North Rd and along the green space between Great North Rd and Unitec to the Waterview interchange.

Transit's route proposes an elevated structure across the "swampy" Hendon Park, descending into a tunnel under New North Rd, then carrying on, partly underground, to Waterview.

Auckland officials want two major changes. The first is to eliminate a proposed interchange at New North Rd. This would avoid Avondale town centre being clogged with traffic. It would also allow more undergrounding to occur, resulting in more open space above. Instead, there would be only the one interchange, that adjacent to the Blockhouse Bay intersection with Great North Rd.

The other major change being proposed is to avoid the Oakley Creek valley next to Unitec by shoving Great North Rd west on to land at present occupied by houses, and running the motorway, in a half-buried trench, along where Great North Rd now runs.

Auckland City's acting transport planning group manager, Allen Bufton, says part of the new motorway could run under Great North Rd, but at this stage there's a lot of fine-tuning to be done. He acknowledges that talk of shifting a row of houses will be alarming to those concerned, but says it's a matter of treating people fairly.

He says that often in the past "cost rears its ugly head and we fall back and end up widening a road three or four metres closer to someone's bedroom or living room and they're left with a pretty awful situation."

He says if you do deal fairly and offer good compensation and, if desired, alternative housing in the locality, "at least they're away from it, they're not going to have a road nearer to their living room or bedroom".

He also holds out hope for those who can't escape, arguing the traffic will drop in Great North Rd from 45,000 vehicles a day to fewer than 20,000.

While conceding the completion of the western bypass is long overdue, my fear is that, once again, a roading project will gobble up the money, leaving the purse empty for the equally urgent and overdue completion of a decent public transport system.

At yesterday's launch of the Auckland regional land transport strategy, regional land transport committee chairman Joel Cayford added his voice to the chorus of warnings to the Government of the need to change its funding priorities and give public transport a fair go.

In the run-up to last election, we were promised a public transit revolution.

It's time to deliver.