Motorway links get green light

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Two key Auckland motorway links have received a $309 million green light towards the completion of a western loop to bypass central city chokepoints.

State funding agency Transfund yesterday granted the money for 4km extensions to each end of the Southwestern Motorway, benefiting commuters and airport visitors.

From 2010, a predominantly four-lane State Highway 20 will sweep for 20km between the Southern Motorway at Manukau and the western edge of Mt Roskill.

It will take another seven years - and at least $850 million more - before a final link through Owairaka and Waterview to the Northwestern Motorway is completed.

This will offer vehicles a south-north bypass of central Auckland, in association with a $250 million motorway under construction from Hobsonville to Albany across the upper Waitemata Harbour.

Until then, State Highway 20 will end at a roundabout with connections to new extensions to Sandringham Rd in Wesley and Maioro St in New Windsor. The latter will be widened to four lanes.

The Auckland City Council is also spending $13.4 million widening Tiverton Rd and Wolverton Rd, and its Waitakere counterpart is considering modifications to the Portage Rd and Totara Ave roundabouts in New Lynn to cope with more traffic.

The motorway extension, which has been flagged since the 1960s but delayed in recent years by legal opposition from groups such as the Auckland Volcanic Cones Society to stop it hacking into the side of Mt Roskill, will cost $152 million.

Transit chief executive Rick van Barneveld said contracts for the four-year project should be let before September, with work to start in the summer.

Costing even more, although less controversial, will be a $157 million link from the Puhinui Rd interchange near Papatoetoe to the Southern Motorway just south of the Rainbow's End fun park. That project should be finished by 2010.

The Manukau City Council will spend about $12 million on associated road links and $10 million on enabling works in preparation for a $30 million branch railway running parallel to the motorway from the city centre to the main trunk line.

Critics of the Mt Roskill extension claim it will soon become choked with traffic, dumping deeper into suburbia the 40,000 vehicles a day that join or exit the existing motorway at Hillsborough Rd, which is heavily congested at peak times.

As well as a cycleway and 3m shoulders for buses along the route, Transit would consider rationing access to the motorway at peak times, said Mr van Barneveld.

Traffic lights would be installed at on-ramps in a technique called "ramp metering" that is being tested at the Mangere Bridge entry to the Southwestern Motorway.

"There is no way we are going to allow it to be just a parking lot."

He said tolls would be introduced in the longer term only if councils agreed on a "congestion pricing" strategy throughout the region.

A third westbound crawler lane will be built up the hill from Queenstown Rd to Dominion Rd, and Transit has enough land to turn the motorway into six lanes if necessary.