Roadworks delay traffic on Auckland's overcrowded motorways

By ARNOLD PICKMERE

Welcome to the busiest road route in New Zealand and the 200,000 vehicles a day that charge - or more often creep - through Auckland's Spaghetti Junction.

It is the Southern Motorway at its most hemmed-in. The place where roadworks seem as though they might never end.

It is early afternoon between the Newmarket Viaduct and Khyber Pass Rd. Roaring traffic is streaming north and south. It is moving smoothly because no one has broken down lately and it is too early for the late-afternoon snail race.

In the middle of the motorway, workers in fluorescent vests and hard hats are busying themselves. It is an organised jumble of machines, compressors, old and new concrete, reinforcing steel and machinery.

Pneumatic drills compete with the vehicle noise on the other side of the safety barriers - the workers' protection in a hostile environment where health and safety considerations get heavy emphasis.

On the concrete crash barriers are plywood screens on metal frames, meant to stop motorists being distracted by the roadworks.

But in this environment the screens have other welcome uses. They cut the traffic noise a bit and offer the workers some added protection from flying objects.

About 50 tonnes of rubbish is recovered off this central length of the motorway each year - hubcaps, bits off truck loads, tyre rubber, vehicle parts. The other day a car bumper was found lying beside the crash barrier in the right-hand northbound lane.

About 200 people - engineers, skilled workers and construction staff from the Freeflow alliance of Transit NZ, Fletcher Construction, Beca Carter Hollings & Ferner and Higgins Contractors - are rebuilding the section of motorway. But they have to do it without being able to close parts of the overloaded route to the main traffic flows.

Their work goes on at all hours, fitted around the need to have all - or nearly all - lanes operating.

Months of nibbling away at the rock faces near Auckland Grammar School and St Peter's College and the regularly changing lane structure in the area are all about winning more lane-space and allowing more efficient traffic management.

To the south, the 204m Khyber Pass Viaduct, built between 1965 and 1968, has been undergoing an almost secretive attack from below as engineers change it from twin structures to a single, greatly strengthened structure with more lane space in what used to be a gap between.

The complexities of installing and stressing the 14 huge reinforced concrete beams tying the two structures together - and the many brackets strengthening the outer edges - explain the frequent night-time closure of adjacent on- and off-ramps.

Work on the Khyber Pass-to-Gillies Ave stretch, due to be finished late this year, is only part of the $55 million Stage 1 of Transit NZ's Central Motorway Junction project.

Plans are being worked out for better and new connections, more lanes where possible and redesigning on- and off-ramps for smoother, safer flows.

So how much will all this help the motorist stuck in rush-hour traffic?

Transit predicts some improvement through the area, but there is a catch. Traffic volumes are growing so fast that the work is mainly catch-up - any long-term effect is likely to be minor.