- Recent road improvements include extensions to Warkworth and Cambridge, enhancing travel north and south.
- Transport Minister Simeon Brown suggests tolls for future ‘roads of national significance’ due to funding gaps.
- Public opposition exists, but tolls could encourage thoughtful road use and fund infrastructure.
Driving north or south from Auckland these holidays, you find you are cruising on smooth, wide, well-engineered roads in each direction, safely separated and designed for speeds of 110km/h.
They are a joy to drive on for as far as they go, which is now Warkworth in the north and just beyond Cambridge to the south. To reach the end is to wish they went further.
We are impatient, we tend to forget it is only a year or two since the Waikato Expressway was completed with its Hamilton bypass, and the Northern Gateway was extended beyond Pūhoi. Those who tell us New Zealand has an infrastructure deficit ignore the motorways added in recent years.
Auckland has the Waterview tunnel and northwestern connections, Wellington has its Transmission Gully and new motorway on the Kāpiti Coast. Christchurch now has highways around its western perimeter.
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