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Eastern transport corridor: Putting it in context

Auckland’s proposed eastern transport corridor has its promoters, led by Auckland & Manukau mayors John Banks & Sir Barry Curtis, and it has plenty of detractors.

>For a long time I have paid not too much attention to the corridor, figuring it would be a lot harder to blast your way through expensive Remuera backyards than it was to knock down shanties back of Karangahape Rd years ago to create the motorway system’s Spaghetti Junction.

Some patches of open space are available for the corridor, but I figured they would be heartily protected too.

However, Auckland’s eastern suburbs – like many areas in the region – are full of bottlenecks, so a solution remains necessary.

This article traverses the eastern corridor, the transport needs of the region, the notions of suburban nodes & subregional hubs, covers a little bit of history, visits a couple of public transport issues and contains about 2350 words.

If you want to rebut some part of this (or any other article, for that matter), raise a question or, especially, take things forward, use the forum page for short messages or send me an email to say you want to submit a longer article. Your views won’t be edited (apart from expletives & defamation), but will be decorated with headings & illustration.

What to do?

What to do? Acknowledging the rise in car use since Jap imports began flooding into the country a decade or so ago, planners are called on to give them the space needed to move around freely. Simply, that means more roads.

Secondly, it means working out smart road patterns.

Alternatively, it means thinking up other ways of transporting more people so more roads aren’t needed and those we already have are easier to drive along.

Laterally, we need to examine the purpose of our travel, of our roads, of our transport systems, what might make us change them and what changes to them might bring.

Backwards, first

But first, let’s briefly go backwards.

The Auckland Harbour Bridge was built because lots of people were living on the northern side of the Waitemata Harbour, had to use ferries to cross it, and could be joined by lots more residents if there was a bridge.

Of course they had to be penalised for living there – a toll each way, slowing the traffic and causing more congestion than simple numbers on the motorway were causing. The tolls have gone, one by one, but there’s a renewed toll suggestion just to make people north of the bridge aware that when they cross the harbour they are incurring a cost on south-of-the-bridge ratepayers. They bring no benefits.

The bridge & the motorway sweeping through the heart of the isthmus did more than open up the suburbs immediately over the bridge. Apart from sweeping residents out of narrow city-fringe suburban streets, the motorway opened up land for subdivision 20km north of Auckland, made it a quick journey south to the new Manukau and its spread of new suburbs, and pulled Hamilton, Coromandel & Northland into close reach of the burgeoning urban centre.

In time, too, the motorway grew more legs, with ramps off to the industrial heartland of Penrose & Mt Wellington, more ramps off to the new far eastern suburbs beyond Pakuranga, and eventually better access to the west & north-west.

Queen St the heart – or is it?

Always, in these infrastructure expansions, Auckland’s central business district is considered the heart. I stood on Queen St this week, chatting to a seasoned real estate salesman who asked: What shop would entice people to deliberately enter the cbd (not serve them because they happened to be there already)? In the old days, he said, Smith & Caughey’s department store might have done it. Nowadays, however, there’s nothing unique about Queen St shopping that you can’t find in a mall, and the mall has free parking.

Go backwards again for a moment. Apart from the rise of the suburban mall, 2 other things changed the role of the cbd in the past 20 years. Newmarket, in its last days as a borough, competed with Auckland City for retailers and won. The Broadway strip became host to some upmarket shops and competed for pedestrian traffic, the kind of thing in most cities you’d expect to be in the central shopping area.

And, in the late 80s, the city allowed its central business district to be ripped apart as a business destination. The harbour board owned significant slabs of the cbd and wasn’t about to entertain freehold development by anybody else on its patch, developers found land at good prices nearby, so some office development stretched to Albert St and the Symonds St ridge became a business district.

Creation of the Central Park office park extended this shift of corporate business out of the cbd and there are now numerous suburban office zones – College Hill, Grafton, Greenlane, Manukau, Smales Farm to name just a few.

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Auckland & Aucklanders now

Now look at Auckland as it is. It’s a city of about 1.2 million people, once divided for administrative purposes into 34 local body areas, now down to 7 cities & districts, probably soon to be one or 2. How & when the next reduction comes, and whether it’s done sensibly, will rely on the outcome of horsetrading. Each of the old local body areas has its heart, in some cases a small shopping strip which may have been overtaken by a nearby mall but struggles on nevertheless. Our privately owned mobility enables most of us to travel in whatever direction we choose, so we do.

We can live in the west, work in the south, take off to the north for the weekend and take our boat to the Coromandel for summer. We have enormous good fortune. Only thing wrong, really, is that we frequently get stuck in traffic, and it’s getting worse.

Some of that jam is on the central motorway junction, which is being expanded, so completion there will ease some congestion. But one of the key congestion causes is that we have to use the same piece of road to travel in quite different directions at the same time. Travellers to & from the cbd at peak hours have to be on the same piece of road as a person wanting to cross the harbour or go to or from much of Manukau.

Planning ahead

Under the planning strategies worked through at the Regional Growth Forum over the past 7 years, there are proposals to turn some of our oldtime suburban business & shopping districts into nodes, where people would live & work in higher-density zones. That takes a while to get accepted, and to get to happen. Railway stations are being spruced up as part of the encouragement.

Higher-density nodal development is ideal for the growth of public transport, but success with that ideal first means discouraging us from using our private anytime mobility & storage space, the car.

Even more important than the suburban node is the subregional hub – a city centre very quickly & easily accessed from other hubs and with easy access within its immediate surrounds.

This notion is not on the agenda in a serious way.

An attempt is being made at Albany after 2 decades of ad hoc development nearby, so the city centre hub notion has to compete with disruptive elements such as office, warehouse & light mechanical (hardly industrial) zones with congestive access and without remotely sensible public transport or adequate retail services for their worktime inhabitants.

An airport is being promoted for the Defence Force’s Whenuapai airbase because there’s a runway in place already, there’s plenty of land for related development and this would compensate for the loss of earnings from the departing population.

The MUL, and planning for the future

One of the arguments against Whenuapai’s redevelopment is that it’s outside the MUL – the metropolitan urban limit, which the Auckland Regional Council has charged itself with zealously guarding against spillover. The growth forum & regional council theme is that urban sprawl beyond the existing limits is inherently bad, although some will inevitably occur and at times the MUL will be redrawn.

Developers, of course, like greenfields land because they can doodle freely in the sand, each time coming up with the most intensive use they can imagine.

Local body politicians have been drawn into the regional planning web, but also have their sometimes conflicting local interests to consider. Rodney District, across the north of the region, wants to be more than a farm & cheap playground, introducing new development zones which will enhance the district’s earnings. It also wants better access between the Hibiscus Coast, Warkworth & Wellsford, which the proposed Northern Motorway extension would do.

Coincidentally, the motorway extension so far has opened up the Matakana area and further extension would greatly enhance business in Northland.

Longer vision & better impact studies needed

You can fairly easily surmise the impacts from putting in a new road or upgrading an existing route. I have already slated the Berl (Business & Economic Research Ltd) report, Investing for growth: Economic & strategic importance of the eastern transport corridor, for repeating a few points & making us little the wiser about potential changes arising from the corridor.

A far better economic impact study needs to be done there, on the impact of Auckland’s motorway extensions north (and perhaps north-west), and on possible hubs at 50km or 100km steps out from downtown Auckland.

The eastern transport corridor fits into that larger equation of an Auckland that spreads from the Brynderwyns in the north to the Bombays in the south.

27km of motorway plus a myriad of other features

The corridor is, essentially, 27km of motorway that will get traffic faster between Manukau City & the Auckland cbd.

A closer look at the Recommended option report by Opus International Consultants Ltd reveals a myriad of other features, many of which can be pursued for their local value and some of which can be left for years being put in place.

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One of the most important paragraphs in the report is this: “Only 8% of general vehicles using any part of the eastern transport corridor have the Auckland cbd as their destination. Nearly 40% of vehicles passing Orakei are predicted to use the Grafton Gully State Highway 16 connection to reach destinations to the west (using the North-western Motorway) and the north (using the Northern Motorway).”

Starting in the south, the corridor route heads due north from Manukau Central and ends up heading due west into the cbd. As the 40% passing Orakei would almost entirely be commuter traffic, it would be sent into another bottleneck in the Grafton Gully, and it would be competing for space for much of its journey with traffic trying to reach the cbd.

Some of the other 52% of traffic in the corridor would be localised, while much of it would be commuter traffic from the Pakuranga-St Heliers areas towards Manukau Central, industrial zones and the airport.

Enter the Jetsons

Proponents of public transport see the switch from private (or company lease) car to train or bus as a straight either/or option. To win people across in large numbers, though, they need to draw on television programmes like the Jetsons: “They can rocket to the future, they can rocket to the moon, they can work on Jupiter, or play on Neptune. Machines do the working, machines do run, if they need anything they push a button and it's done. Their house is in the heaven, the free way is in the sky, but their feet are on the ground 'cause they're just regular guys,” as the theme song goes.

Public transport will need to come with storage facilities – for all that stuff on the back seat of the car, or the kids’ sports gear. And when you get off your bus or train you will want to transport this luggage easily, and store it at your destination, again easily.

You may want to go to 3 places during the day, or even 6 – and unless the public transport can do the lot, easily & in good time, you will drive.

Snobbery & contagion

There are other aspects of public transport which don’t get discussed, such as snobbery & contagion. For example, to get to the cbd from Kohimarama by bus you would catch the Glen Innes bus, but a Kohi person doesn’t want to be seen dead next to a Glen Innes person. There is snobbery in being seen needing to use public transport at all, and there is contagion in rubbing shoulders with the relatively unclean.

Apart from funnelling of people into congestion alleys when they want to go in different directions, the notion that the cbd is the ultimate in destinies needs to be changed (as it is, gradually, changing with cross-city routes such as State Highway 20), or accepted and acted upon.

If the cbd is the ultimate for office work, access should be dramatically improved, pricing should be dramatically changed (parking, rents; greater floor-area ratios) to encourage people to pour into the centre.

In that case an eastern motorway doesn’t make sense as a primary access structure because it’s littered with bottlenecks & congestion incentives.

But in a greater Auckland which becomes one city from the Brynderwyns to the Bombays - with expanded hubs as focal points, nodes for higher density suburban highlights and quick access throughout – the eastern corridor will have an important role.

Reports:

Opus recommended option report, 9 March 2004

Berl report, Investing for growth: Economic & strategic importance of the eastern transport corridor, March 2004

If you want to rebut some part of this (or any other article, for that matter), raise a question or, especially, take things forward, use the forum page for short messages or send me an email to say you want to submit a longer article. Your views won’t be edited (apart from expletives & defamation), but will be decorated with headings & illustration.

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