Tunnel work will shut busy junction

The Birdcage Tavern will be temporarily moved 40m along Franklin Rd while work is carried out. Photo / Natalie Slade

One of central Auckland's busiest intersections - the junction of Victoria St West and Franklin Rd - will be closed over Easter as contractors prepare to start digging a new motorway tunnel.

The closure from early on Good Friday until 5am on Tuesday is needed to divert two drainage systems, including a large late-19th-century culvert, away from where the "cut and cover" Victoria Park Tunnel is to be dug.

A 220m L-shaped bypass will be made to the 3m-deep brick-lined culvert, which carries a stream beneath the historic Birdcage Tavern to the sea and collects stormwater for all of Freemans Bay on its route from Western Park.

That will allow a Fletcher Construction-led consortium to start digging the three-lane northbound tunnel late next month as the main course of a $406 million project which also includes widening the motorway along the waterfront between Victoria Park and the harbour bridge.

Traffic will be still be able to use the lower part of Franklin Rd, just short of the intersection, to reach the New World supermarket, and access will be maintained past the road works for cyclists and pedestrians.

Left turns from Victoria St West into Union St will also be allowed.

The contractors intend digging the tunnel simultaneously in five places, hoping to complete excavations in about 13 months before fitting it out with safety features and progressively introducing streams of traffic to it from late next year until mid-2012.

They have already built a temporary sealed road diversion at the northern end of Beaumont St and will similarly divert Victoria St West and Franklin Rd next month to allow the big dig to start.

Both diversions are temporarily claiming parts of Victoria Park, and will remain in place until tunnel sections can be dug and then covered to allow traffic back on to the original street alignments.

The Birdcage Tavern, which is being surrounded by construction machinery, will be moved about 40m up Franklin Rd on runway beams in about August and then restored close to its original site once the tunnel is ready.

But it will lose its basement, through which the elderly stormwater culvert runs.

The hotel's site was originally part of Auckland's waterfront, where the stream emptied into Waitemata Harbour before it was enclosed in the arched culvert and Victoria Park was created in a major land reclamation.

Enabling work for the tunnel has also meant nightly closures of the busy Fanshawe St on-ramp to the Northern Motorway this week, meaning traffic has had to use Jervois Rd and Curran St in St Marys Bay to reach the harbour bridge.

Although that work will be suspended over Easter, there will be more night closures next week.

The Jacobs Ladder pedestrian steps from Waitemata St in St Marys Bay and an adjoining track to Beaumont St have also been closed for the duration of the project, which will also include a partly enclosed footbridge across the widened motorway to Westhaven.

But most of a major project to divert a North Shore water supply line along Jervois Rd and down Curran St, to free up the motorway corridor for widening work, has been completed.

Transport Agency state highways manager Tommy Parker yesterday acknowledged the impact on the community of a roading project through the centre of Auckland and said everything was being done to minimise inconvenience to the public.