Quarry plan provokes traffic fears

Residents on all sides of the huge Mt Wellington quarry housing development are fighting council plans to build a four-lane "highway" through the site.

They say it will pour thousands of vehicles a day through residential streets to Panmure, St Johns, Meadowbank and Kohimarama.

They fear the 110ha quarry will fill up with intensive housing and cars for 8000 residents before local roads are ready to cope. Residents and businesses feel let down and ignored by council officers during consultation on the quarry road.

Transport planners asked for public feedback on the new road and then tried to push through an option rejected by 98 per cent of the 112 respondents. Planners want to build the road from College Rd at Ngahue Reserve across the quarry to Morrin Rd, with a new bridge connection to Pilkington Rd at Panmure.

About 80 respondents did not want a link road and 30 others wanted a variation of the link road.

Last night, transport planning acting group manager Allen Bufton said the council was proceeding with an option that did not suit some people, but if the road went elsewhere it would upset another group of people.

"I'm quite confident our consultation processes were as thorough as we could carry out."

He believed most of the people who voted against the chosen option were affected by it, "and quite understandably they want it to go somewhere else".

But community groups have called officers' behaviour an "absolute disgrace", the Tamaki Community Board has criticised the consultation process and there are calls for the council to rethink the proposal.

Greg Nikoloff, of the College Rd Residents Group, said there was a need for a quarry link road but not the four-lane "highway" proposed by the council.

Mr Nikoloff said council planners maintained that most of the traffic crossing the quarry would go left into College Rd and very little right towards St Johns Rd, but produced no evidence to back this "blind assertion".

Another suspicion was that the quarry road would become a "de facto" extension for the revamped eastern transport corridor, funnelling thousands of vehicles into the eastern suburbs from Manukau and the new suburb of 40,000 people at Flatbush. The Auckland City Council voted last year to stop the eastern highway at Glen Innes.

Mr Nikoloff said the council needed to delay the link road to give the community a clear picture about wider transport issues and to undertake proper consultation.

Concerns have also been expressed by the Morrin Rd Business Association, St Johns Park Residents Group, Remuera Community Committee and the Eastern Bays community board.

Keith Sharp, of the Panmure Community Action Group, said the planners were clearly not interested in listening to the community.

The Panmure group and the Tamaki board have also criticised planners for doing nothing to fix peak-hour congestion on the Panmure roundabout and Jellicoe Rd.

Mr Sharp said officers promised three years ago to address the roundabout "as a priority".

Mr Bufton said it would be another 12 months before the route of the new eastern transport corridor was known, which would resolve issues with surrounding arterial roads, and would determine what happened to the roundabout.