Happy faces in a huge traffic jam

Aucklanders came of age this time 50 years ago by revelling in bumper-to-bumper traffic jams as they celebrated their new harbour bridge.

A Cavalcade of Progress across the bridge on Queen's Birthday Monday in 1959, two days after opening day on May 30, spread the joy by jamming roads on both sides of the Waitemata Harbour.

"Traffic paralysed - worst tangle on record in Auckland," the Herald reported of the parade of cars and floats that spent six hours inching from Newmarket to Devonport as crowds thronged a winding 28km route.

Takapuna businesses initially planned festivities for Sunday, but delayed those until the next day, after churches objected.

Times might have changed on that score, but bridge authority chief Sir John Allum had already bemoaned early versions of graffiti marring girders on his and Auckland's new pride and joy.

He cited these - and even a risk of falling paint-pots - to argue against a preview walk across the bridge, before the authority relented, allowing 106,000 people to pour across it on May 24.

That was more than a quarter of Auckland's population of 406,000, of whom 50,000 were spread among North Shore's five boroughs. Rodney's 6830 residents were counted separately.

The bridge, and two new water-supply mains across it, fuelled a development boom that has more than quadrupled the Shore's population to more than 220,000 and made Rodney home to at least 95,000.

That means a quarter of Auckland's population, which has more than trebled to 1.3 million, now lives across the great waterway which once kept North Shore largely isolated from city hurly-burly.

But against the trend, Devonport lost 10 per cent of its people between 1958 and 1989, when its 10,500 remaining residents were absorbed into North Shore City.

The decline followed the death of the harbour's vehicle ferry service, which carried 5000 cars a day through Devonport, Northcote and Birkenhead but was axed on the bridge's opening day as buses lined up with cars to carry commuters all the way to Auckland.

That was despite an assurance in 1953 by Prime Minister Sid Holland, in forcing Auckland to accept a four-lane "austerity" bridge rather than a proposed five-lane version, that a new highway crossing of the Upper Waitemata combined with a survival of Devonport vehicle ferries would prevent bottlenecks across the main structure.

By the time the first stage of the Greenhithe crossing was built in 1975, the harbour bridge was entrenched as part of the main motorway link through Auckland, dashing early plans for the western ring route to keep long-distance traffic away from a metropolitan centre which was to have been served by electric trains from the 1950s.

Although Devonport passenger ferries survived, fare rises of up to 166 per cent the day after the bridge opened sent hordes of commuters charging for the buses. Regular patrons of Auckland parking buildings complained of being squeezed out by an "invasion" of motorists from the Shore.

The bridge, meanwhile, far exceeded all expectations, being swamped with more than 50,000 vehicles in its first 29 hours and often carrying 17,500 a day by mid-1962, when Sir John warned that it had already become too late to build a second harbour crossing in time to avert traffic jams.

Aided by four extra clip-on lanes added in 1969, traffic kept building every year apart from during the 1976 oil supply shock until it peaked at a daily average of 166,952 in 2006.

The average has since eased to 153,324 thanks to a combination of the new Northern Busway and healthy employment growth in recent years which has made it easier for more North Shore residents to find work nearer home.