Bury rail station says ARC transport chairman 

Auckland Regional Council transport chairman Joel Cayford favours building an underground railway station at New Lynn to encourage town-centre regeneration rather than urban sprawl at city limits.

Dr Cayford, who chairs both the council's transport policy committee and the regional land transport committee, is concerned at plans by Waitakere City Council for a new "sub-regional centre" spilling past the northern metropolitan boundary at Westgate.

He wants his council and the new Auckland Regional Transport Authority to work with local bodies and land holders to ensure infrastructure such as rail and bus stations and ferry terminals are built in ways and places which add value to the public spaces of town centres.

"One such proposal is to underground the rail station in New Lynn," he told a transport conference in Auckland yesterday.

Waitakere intends applying to the regional council today for approval to extend its northern boundary past Westgate, at the end of the Northwestern Motorway, across State Highway 16.

Deputy Mayor Carolynne Stone said her council was keen on burying the railway line running through New Lynn to improve urban development it had already promoted around that centre.

But she said it had only limited options left for more development around both New Lynn and Henderson, and wanted a third centre at Westgate to offer the business and commercial opportunities needed to make the city more self-sustainable.

Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey said last night that Dr Cayford was being "very unreasonable because we have basically run out of land - if we can't go up the [Waitakere] foothills, where else can we go?"

Dr Cayford said that the development of greenfield sites, by other councils as well as by Waitakere, would exacerbate transport congestion and blunt the Regional Growth Strategy's thrust for more intensive uses of existing urban land.

He said local councils at the edge of the region were showing "massive" support for new greenfield developments.

"I am advised Waitakere wants a new sub-regional centre at Westgate along the lines of North Shore's Albany," he said.

"Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that it is more of the same - low-density development at the edge - sprawl, with attendant transport problems."

He said that although the five-year-old growth strategy had lacked legal clout until now, this would change with the publication at the end of next month of the region's highest planning document, which carries substantial statutory force.

The Government passed legislation last year requiring that document, the Regional Policy Statement, to be changed so the urban form of the region could give better support to public transport.

This was one of the Government's conditions for promising the region an extra $1.6 billion for transport over the next 10 years.

Ms Stone said the growth strategy had always earmarked Westgate as a sub-regional centre and her council had promoted a greater intensification of developments on existing urban land than any local authority bound by the document.

She welcomed Dr Cayford's support for an underground station at New Lynn.