Hearings Begin on Warkworth Section of Holiday Highway
The Herald has noted that the Board of Enquiry gets under way today for the Puhoi-Warkworth section of the Puhoi-Welsford Roads of National Significance Program otherwise known as the Holiday Highway.
Fast-tracking of $760m extension to be considered over 14 days.
Plans for one of the country’s most expensive transport projects – a $760 million extension of Auckland’s motorway network to Warkworth – go under the microscope today.
A board of inquiry appointed for fast-tracking planning consideration of the 18.5km extension as the first half of a Road of National Significance will preside over 14 days of hearings.
The Government is promoting the extension over 12 viaducts and bridges from the Johnstones Hill traffic tunnels south of Puhoi to a new roundabout north of Warkworth, as a vital freight and tourism link with Northland.
Even so, many of the 14,000 vehicles a day expected to use the new road by 2026 will double back to Warkworth’s often bottlenecked Hill St turnoff to eastern beaches.
That keeps critics such as Auckland Council infrastructure chairman Mike Lee calling it “the holiday highway” to the intense annoyance of Northland leaders and former Rodney mayor Penny Webster.
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There will only be one traffic interchange between Orewa and Warkworth, to be confined to just south-facing ramps at Puhoi, after residents protested against an earlier plan which would have denied them access.
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So you will need to double back and still get held up at the notorious Hill Road intersection at Warkworth in order to get to the eastern beaches. That in itself is rather self-defeating.
In any case the Holiday Highway even if fully completed as the gold-plated 4-lane motorway would still fall well short of where it would need to be if it were to serve the population and industrial centres of Northland. You would need to take the motorway all the way to Whangarei itself to get the “benefits” you would be sort after – much like the 4-lane expressway Auckland to Hamilton and Cambridge.
Ironically there has been two more cheaper but more beneficial transport schemes to connect Auckland up to Northland than the Holiday Highway. One is Operation Lifesaver devised by Transport Blog, the other is to fully upgrade the North Auckland (rail) Line from Swanson to Whangarei with a branch line to Marsden Point (home of a deep water port and our oil refinery) to allow our more powerful DL’s to haul longer trains from the area south (like logs).
You can read about Operation Lifesaver as an alternative to the Holiday Highway HERE.
Operation Lifesaver I believe follows the same premise as the upgrades to State Highway 2 that have happened and are going to continue to happen again soon. You can read what NZTA has done and what it will be up to with State Highway 2 here: Safety Improvements for State Highway 2. Once the upgrades are complete that section of State Highway 2 (which carries more regular, holiday and freight traffic than the Holiday Highway ever would) will allow that traffic to travel efficiently and safely to their destinations. So if these kind of simple upgrades to a much busier State Highway 2 are effective why does State Highway 1 going north need to be a 4-lane Motorway that does not really go the distance it would need to? And these upgrades to State Highway 2 are very similar to what Operation Lifesaver proposes.
Lets hope this Board of Inquiry puts the Holiday Highway under the same intense microscope as it did to a Wellington Highway project last month. And cross fingers the Board of Inquiry might start shifting us away from this motorway to something more viable that will not break the bank…
Herald being disingenuous again I noted from the Herald’s property writer Anne Gibson that apparently high rises are heading for our suburbs in Auckland and that people are “alarmed.” … Continue reading High Rises are NOT Heading for the Burbs
Seems we in Auckland are not the only one suffering road and transit chaos (on a regular basis) with for some unknown reason last night the CBD jammed up and both cars and buses unable to move very far very fast.
Melbourne this morning is gripped with a major accident on one of its Free-ways which has brought road traffic to a stand-still while their City Loop suffered a fault causing a meltdown on the heavy rail network.
There was a common theme though between Auckland and Melbourne as I looked through The Age – well three themes:
Decades long infrastructure deficits and neglect that both Auckland and Melbourne are trying to catch up on
Governments self congratulating themselves
Governments heading rather fast towards ineptness with major transport upgrades required (our Government with the CRL start date at 2020 despite the Prime Minister’s conditions for the speed up now being met, and the Melbourne State Government for differing its mass transit investment programs for two more electoral cycles (while hell-bent on their East-West Link motorway)).
Meanwhile I notice the very conservative Utah is continuing to push through its mass transit investment which patronage levels doing very well indeed. For that matter I am noticing more Northern Hemisphere Conservative Governments pushing through large mass transit programs while the Southern Hemisphere Conservative Governments fall behind the 8-ball. Not amusing when you live in one of those Southern Hemisphere countries…
Stonefields was to be served by a third plumbing network.
New Zealand’s first environmentally sustainable public “third pipe” scheme, planned to serve thousands of homes with recycled storm water, has been plugged.
Rain falling on Stonefields – a redevelopment of a former East Auckland quarry – was to be fed to a storm water retention pond and treated to feed a plumbing network to toilets and garden taps.
However, despite the network being built at a cost of more than $7.5 million, municipal water supplier Watercare has rejected it on grounds of potential water quality and price issues.
Residents are disappointed..
“The chance of us all realising cost savings from using non-potable water supply and reducing our monthly water bills, including waste water charges, will be removed from us without consultation,” said the Stonefields Residents Association.
A Watercare spokesman said the decision was intended “to protect public health – treated storm water would not meet New Zealand’s drinking water standards and Watercare’s A Grade for water supply could be jeopardised by operation of the third pipe system.”
Watercare also said the cost of running the system would result in Stonefields residents paying five times more than the $1.34 per 1000 litres that Watercare would charge.
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So Watercare are rejecting this “third-pipe” which is “treated” because of water-quality and price issues. Yet the water (which a savvy person could also connect a rain tank to as well) was to be used for toilets and garden taps rather than the taps we get our drinking water from. So you will have to forgive me Watercare but I never knew we needed A-grade water for the garden tap and toilet as I never knew I was going to be drinking out of them…
It’s not recycled black-water (water that has come from a sewerage plant) and the storm water is “treated” so what is the issue here?
The issue is most likely Watercare would be upset because they might get a drop in revenue especially around the 80% waste-water charge will honestly stinks. I know from the 100% fresh water I draw from the Watercare mains does not end back down the sewer pipes at the 80% level – especially in the Summer – yet I get hit for it.
I know here where I live in Papakura there is some storm-water ponds that also act as a “lake” for the local park that could be potentially used in a scheme that Stonefields would have got until now.
At the same time I thought Auckland was meant to be an Eco-City and recycling treated storm water for non drinking purposes would have been a good step in reaching those “eco” goals.
Roll eyes material this is – really.
Looking over storm water pond to North Western flank of the park. New Social Housing development to occur behind that flank
Of note is that the entire Committee will be behind closed doors as the sole item is on the long-awaited Third Tranche for the Special Housing Area. While the discussion is behind closed doors for the Committee a public announcement is due either next month or in June. From what I have gathered so far this third tranche is larger than the first two and a particular focus could be around Brownfield development (so existing urban areas). We await the public announcement when it comes out (ironically at the same time as Auckland Transport releases the Rail Strategy as well).
I see two things of note in this Committee; the first being an update on Wynyard Quarter, and the second being (behind closed doors) on the St James Theatre.
What did catch my attention though and no doubt will catch the attention of a few is St James Theatre is being debated again. Exactly what I do not know as it is in the Closed Agenda of the Committee but no doubt the media will start running its commentary on it from tomorrow if not Thursday.
Today at 2pm the Prime Minister and Minister of Transport will be at Britomart to officially launch “electrification” in Auckland. Our first EMU services on the Onehunga Line do not start however, until April 28th with the Manukau Line being in August, and the Southern and Western Lines after that. I have heard rumour some other announcement was planned to be tagged on today as well but we will have to wait and see. I highly doubt it will be a CRL package for 2017 – but hey we can keep pushing.
So National or Labour on Housing And the battle for the housing affordability answer is very much under way with Labour and their Kiwi Build, and National with … Continue reading Labour on Housing
The accident happened on I believe the from north to west link of the State Highway One/Twenty interchange that is known for speeding traffic and useless merging
Having a major route to the airport closed is not particular good. Then again neither is accidents anywhere on the motorway network nor blockages on the rail network and the trains not being able to “run around.” So the question is how do we get the transport network to be more resilient for both freight and people.
Leave your comments below of inclined email me for a guest post spot.
[Please note I am not taking aim at Digi-Poll in any shape or form and I do respect their credibility as a polling company highly. I do however, take aim at the NZ Herald for their “reporting” and not laying out the fall statistical facts about the poll clearly in their article]
I did notice the Herald Digi-Poll out this morning citing a poll about Mayor Len Brown. You can read the article here: Thumbs down for Len Brown – poll
What the online piece did not show was the actual graphs which can be seen below from Twitter earlier today:
Now, the Herald-Digipoll is supposed to be a real survey, with samples that are more or less representative after weighting. There isn’t a margin of error reported, but the standard maximum margin of error would be a little over 6%.
There are two aspects of the data that make it not look representative. Thr first is that only 31.3%, or 37% of those claiming to have voted, said they voted for Len Brown last time. He got 47.8% of the vote. That discrepancy is a bit larger than you’d expect just from bad luck; it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see about 1 or 2 times in 1000 by chance.
More impressively, 85% of respondents claimed to have voted. Only 36% of those eligible in Auckland actually voted.
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So, how could the poll be so badly wrong? It’s unlikely to just be due to bad sampling — you could do better with a random poll of half a dozen people. There’s got to be a fairly significant contribution from people whose recall of the 2013 election is not entirely accurate, or to put it more bluntly, some of the respondents were telling porkies. Unfortunately, that makes it hard to tell if results for any of the other questions bear even the slightest relationship to the truth.
The journalist running the story is not known to be “objective” from time to time and has been pulled up before for either slanting or giving a misrepresentation (that is his opinion rather than a claimed fact).
So I would be very careful in trotting out this poll which has misrepresentations and a bad case of slanting as proof of fact against the Mayor. Using such a poll in that method will not do your credibility any good – although two of the oppositional five Councillors had (although expected).
Back to City Building we go as there is nothing to see from that Orsman piece.
Expansion of Warehousing = Good News Respected and veteran reporter Bob Dey has reported on an extra 400,000m2 of new warehousing in Auckland over the last six months. Whether … Continue reading Auckland Economy Continues to Improve
Talking Southern Auckland 