Foot traffic for new tunnels
Auckland’s western ring route finally complete after 60 years in the making and $1.4b Big names join fresh push on climate
About 20,000 people went through the Waterview tunnel yesterday, among them a 10-week-old baby and a former prison officer who in the 1950s had scattered the remains of one of the men killed during construction of the Auckland Harbour Bridge.
The tunnel will open to traffic around the first weekend of July, but the New Zealand Transport Authority is not giving the exact date or time for safety reasons and to avoid queues of motorists.
It completes the 48km western motorway ring route — a second motorway route through Auckland — and includes a giant motorway interchange at Great North Road to connect the Southwestern and Northwestern Motorways.
Prime Minister Bill English was joined by Transport Minister Simon Bridges and Finance Minister Steven Joyce to cut the ribbon on the $1.4 billion tunnel project, saying it was part of massive pipeline of investment to support a strong economy and population growth.
English said the Waterview tunnel project was 60 years in the making and a big day for New Zealand.
“There are a lot more projects in the pipeline and this gives us real confidence that we have got the infrastructure capacity to do the investment that is needed to support growth in New Zealand.”
Bridges said the twin tunnels, which completes the 48km western ring route, marked a pivotal milestone not just for Auckland but New Zealand’s highway network.
After speeches and the ribbon cutting, it was the turn of about 20,000 Aucklanders to enter the underground tunnel at the Mt Roskill end, for a chilly walk on a 2.5km or 3.5km circuit.
First to enter the northbound tunnel was student Azwhayn McLean, who used the speed of his wheelchair to make history.
“I’m pretty excited. I thought other people would beat me in. I’ve been interested in seeing how it has unfolded and how it is going to go. “It’s an exciting development of what is happening in Auckland at the moment, I’m very interested in how it is going to go and excited about the fact it will make it easier to get to Auckland Airport,” said the 26-year-old, who lives in Ponsonby. John Harris, an 82-year-old retired prison officer and bus driver, was unsure if the tunnel would do much to stop the city’s traffic jams, but was looking forward to driving through it.
HWatch the video of the tunnel opening at nzherald.co.nz
Harris did not walk over the harbour bridge before it opened in May 1959, but met the widow of an English worker who drowned during the construction period. He was a member of the Northcote Birkenhead Yacht Club and took the worker’s ashes to be sprinkled around the piles of the bridge.
No-one was killed during five years of construction on the Waterview tunnel, but a 33-year-old project worker called Dennis died of cancer. A gantry was named after him and painted yellow in honour of the Cancer Society.
Tonight, a cocktail party will be held inside the tunnel to raise funds for the Cancer Society.
Azaria Webster would have been among the youngest people to go through the tunnel at 10 weeks old. She was wrapped up warmly in the arms of her grandfather, Leith Carter, of nearby New Windsor.
“I’ve watched it along the way. It’s interesting to see the end product and it’s what I would expect but when it comes to congestion I’m not convinced it will help,” Carter said.
Brett Gliddon, NZTA’s Auckland and Northland highway manager, said the tunnel had involved a lot of people, a lot of effort and a lot of time to deliver a great result.
“This is definitely a career highlight,” said Gliddon about the 2.4km twin tunnels, the longest road tunnel in New Zealand.
He said it had been a big and complex project, involving the tenth largest boring machine in the world at the time, called Alice.
Auckland mayor Phil Goff expressed concern about a $4b gap in the $24b joint Government and council infrastructure spend in the city over the next 10 years. With rapid population growth, he said the gap was $7b.
“While we applaud this tunnel, it’s great we have connected the network up, it will take pressure off local roads . . . but in peak-hour congestion this road will become congested just like every other.” Celebrities, scientists, doctors, businesspeople and hundreds of others came together yesterday to launch a fresh nationwide push for action on climate change.
The new movement, Our Climate Declaration, calls on the Government to phase out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels by 2050 — including stopping all new coal mines and coalburning plants and ending deep sea oil exploration and fracking for oil and gas — and adopting bolder policy.
This included a new Climate Commission to set a binding carbon budget, replacing the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) with a carbon tax, strengthening the country’s Paris Agreement obligations, making the energy, transport and farming sectors more sustainable, and boosting carbon sinks with 1.3 million ha of marginal land restored to native forest.
It also calls on all Kiwis to do their part through grassroots community climate action plans, where organisations investigate their own climate impact and make plans to reduce it.
Backing the declaration — launched at live broadcast events at Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin — were well-known Kiwis including actress Robyn Malcolm, businessman Phillip Mills, journalist Rod Oram, musician Peter Scholes, botanist Emeritus Professor Sir Alan Mark and climate scientist Professor James Renwick.
“If you sign up to this, you are saying you will do something yourself, and especially, you will call on the Government to do more,” said Renwick, of Victoria University’s School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences.
“If we are going to stop warming at 1.5C [ of future temperature rise], we’ve got about five years left at present emission levels — and to stop the warming at 2C, we’ve got maybe 20 years left ...
“We are already over 1C, to get to 1.5C, or 2C, it’s not going to take that long . . . and after that we start melting big chunks of ice sheets.”
Dr Joanna Santa Barbara, national chairwoman of the push, said it was known what had to be done.
“And it has to be done by people at all levels — citizens, businesses, local councils and government,” she said.