AHWC - Victoria Park

Today's post is going to start a sub-series on what we can expect, hope or desire for if there was to be an Additional Waitemata Harbour Crossing (AWHC).

To start with a disclaimer; everything I'm about to say are simply my thoughts an ideas, the AWHC is still very early in it's design stages and so the actual form of the project is largely unknown at this stage. My thoughts are going to be based on the design drawings from October 2010.

For this particular post I am going to focus on the southern side of the proposed including Victoria Park, St Marys Bay and Freemans Bay. The image below shows the area in all it's glory back in 1959 just after the Auckland Harbour Bridge and Victoria Park Flyover were opened. For some history of the area, back in 1870 there was no Tank Farm and Victoria Park itself was a bay with what are the Victoria Park Markets today on the foreshore. 

Auckland Council - 1959

Jump 45 years into the future and things weren't all that different, St Marys Bay had been further reclaimed, a marina had been built and marine related light & heavy industry have been beavering away along with the petrochemical industry.

In the past 10 years there has been quite a notable change, with the successful redevelopment of the viaduct area and the growing CBD, the heavy industry has all been pushed out and the expensive process of decontamination and redevelopment of the Tank Farm has seen a rather large change to the area.

One thing that hasn't changed to much is the large viaduct that goes through the middle of the park. Now 55 years old this structure has been a feature in the park for pretty much half of it's existence. At first impressions you could point to it and call it a relic of the motorway age, the time when the focus was to get cars moving no matter the cost. Certainly when I went down there to take some photos I already had the opinion in my head that it would be a dark depressing environment with the noise of vehicles rumbling overhead.

Transport Logic - 2014

Transport Logic - 2014

Strangely however, once you're down there you can see that it actually serves another rather important function, that being a protected corridor from one side of the park to the other. Currently if you're an office worker at Wynyard Quater and want to go for lunch at the Victoria Park Markets on a wet day you can pretty much guarantee you will take this route under the flyover rather than staying out in the wet. Admittedly the northern end is rather average and turns into a carpark however this raises a question, how will we replace this facility when we remove the flyover?

Ironically, when I was down there most of the non-vehicle activity was right next to the motorway flyover, to one side the new skate park that was built as part of the Victoria Park Tunnel (VPT) was positively overflowing and on the other side there was a bunch of people playing rugby, all the while pedestrians and joggers were running under the bridge. Now I'm certainly not saying these people wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the flyover, it was more than I was rather impressed to see how negligible the impact of the structure was on the users of the park.

Something else I found rather interesting was the level of noise coming from the flyover, it's by no means whisper quiet but it was sort of hard to say which was worse out of the flyover or the local roads. For the flyover you hear the constant whoosh coming from vehicle tyres on the wearing course of the bridge, however for the local roads you hear the green light drag race every time one of the 5 sets of traffic signals changes. When I was down there it was a Sunday morning and traffic on the local roads was rather light, however I'd image that during the working week when there are notably more vehicles I'd say the local roads would put the flyover to shame in terms of noise production. One thing to note here is that the noise from the flyover could easily be greatly reduced, if the current steal handrails on the bridge were replaced with concrete barriers this would send most of the noise directly up into the atmosphere rather than laterally into the park.

Transport Logic - 2014

Transport Logic - 2014

One thing I think most people would agree on is that the park would look better if there were no bridge, the two images above give you the basic idea of what you can expect, one with the flyover and one without. This is where the AWHC comes in as part of the proposed project is to remove the flyover. Take note here that I am not saying that the only thing the AWHC does is remove the flyer, I'm just saying that this is one of the many parts of what would be a $2-3 Billion project.

The place where I see real potential for change however is through St Marys Bay. Currently we have one massive section of road, the reason why it is so wide is not just because we have large volumes of traffic moving through here but it's also the fact we have a number of on/off-ramps with quite complicated horizontal geometry.

Transport Logic - 2014

Now just imagine; if we are going to be removing about 60% of the traffic and sending it through an underground tunnel, and we also remove the various ramps connections that add to the current complexity we could put this section of road on quite a large diet which would free up a large amount of land right on our foreshore. The question is, what do we do with that land?

The following image is a before and after image in Boston which was done as part of "The Big Dig". Now that is the sort of change I would like to see along St Marys Bay, and in my mind well worth $2-3 Billion.

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