Off the beaten track (Why bypassed towns have no regrets)
Since motorways first arrived in New Zealand in 1950, various towns between Cape Reinga and Bluff have found themselves on the main route, and then bumped off it. Kevin Norquay reports.
For towns dotted along State Highway 1, the word bypass can evoke two meanings: avoid, circumvent, dodge or evade; or a procedure akin to heart surgery that allows traffic to flow past a blockage.
For some, exit arrows and off ramps are the only clues to drivers that they still exist.
Penrose was the first suburb to see traffic taken off its main street by the Southern Motorway in 1953, followed by Ota¯ huhu and Papatoetoe two years later.
This year, Paremata, Pukerua Bay and Paeka¯ ka¯ riki were the latest towns to be bypassed, when the 27km four-lane Transmission Gully (Te Ara Nui o Te Rangihaeata) motorway opened north of Wellington.
What fate can they now expect, as traffic cuts past them from Tawa to Ka¯ piti Coast?
Here’s the news, and it’s not all bad. While towns lose through-traffic and related income when a bypass opens, it’s usually insignificant.
Being bypassed means they can breathe again, with town centres more pleasant and more healthy, akin to a human after heart surgery.
Overseas studies have found the most significant benefit of bypasses is in travel-time savings for motorists, who avoid the slower speeds, stops, and congestion.
But towns with bypasses also benefit. Trucks and traffic are diverted away, congestion and noise are reduced, pedestrians are safer, and vehicle emissions are reduced.
Products can be moved in and out more swiftly, and supposedly more cheaply. Mechanics, cafes, shops and motels that rely on through-traffic tend to be the most concerned.
Bypasses change the way people live and interact well before they open, because roads take years to build, Victoria University’s Dr Maire´ ad de Ro´ iste tells the Sunday Star-Times.
Using the Ministry of Transport’s household travel survey, she, Dr Toby Daglish and Dr Yigit Saglam have studied and used econometric modelling to look at travel decisions.
‘‘Normally when [bypasses] open up isn’t where you see the changes in house prices and residential changes,’’ says de Ro´ iste, an associate professor with the university’s School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences.
‘‘People would have been making travel and household location decisions based on Transmission Gully existing.
‘‘There are two parts to this: in the short term, it’s easier for somebody to get from their house to somewhere else in the Wellington region because of these bypasses.
‘‘In the longer term, some of the things that happen in terms of residential decisions is if you’re living in Wellington, Levin becomes a lot more attractive.’’
Escalating petrol prices play a part, as does the rise in working from home because of Covid-19.
‘‘At this stage internationally, nobody knows what the longer-term impact of Covid is likely to be. We’re still grappling with ‘will people return to the CBD?’ It seems like they will, but not to the extent that city centres expect.’’
More roads often mean more cars, de Ro´ iste says. ‘‘Transmission Gully could mean that a family who wouldn’t have considered the Ka¯ piti Coast at all, suddenly says ‘hey, let’s move to
Ka¯ piti. But now that we’re further out, let’s buy another car’, and suddenly, there’s as many road trips as before.’’
Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency carries out a social impact assessment when considering major new roads. A social impact is a (positive or negative) change that can incorporate changes such as: way of life; services and facilities; environment and resources; quality of the living environment; health and wellbeing, and culture and identity.
So let’s look at how towns have fared, after the main road was diverted away from their main street.
Aside from both sitting on the Waikato River, Huntly and Taupo¯ are an unlikely couple to be telling the same story about SH1 passing them by.
Huntly is a weary-looking town around a coalfired power station, while geothermal Taupo¯ attracts skiers, anglers and tourists, and exudes an air of wellbeing, even in these crippling Covid times.
Taupo¯ has had a bypass since 2010; Huntly for just two years. With heavy traffic down, both are looking to beautify and remodel their central areas, taking advantage of their river and lakes. Yes, Huntly also has an
attractive lake, who knew?
Shelley Lynch and Red Wootton are on the community board for Huntly, a town of around 8500 residents just over an hour south of Auckland.
Lynch has lived there all her life . She went to Huntly College, married a coal miner, a son was a coal miner, and she is now a Waikato District councillor.
‘‘Huntly is like a diamond hidden in a rock,’’ she says of her often-maligned home.
‘‘If people drove into Huntly they’d see how beautiful it is. Lake Hakanoa and all the gardens there are lovely, and the Kimihia lakes project will be a tremendous environmental attraction.
‘‘And if you cross the Tainui Bridge across the river you’ll see Lake Puketirini – the deepest, cleanest lake in the whole Waikato district.’’
Wootton is a larger-than-life character rarely seen without a hi-vis vest. He has tattoos, a long flowing beard, greets you like an old friend – ‘‘How ya going mate?’’ – and runs the local speedway.
He arrived 47 years ago from Manurewa, and never left.
‘‘We’re the meat in the sandwich between Auckland and Hamilton now,’’ he says. ‘‘When we built the speedway here 30 years ago there was nothing, now we’re in the middle of everything.
‘‘There’s a lot of good stuff here. It’s just that we are tarred with this brush, we get painted as a shit town, and that’s not actually the case. There’s a lot of good stuff happening here, eh?’’
Before SH1 veered off down the expressway just north of Huntly two years back, it came down the residential main road, around the back of the shops, then past the industrial and residential south.
Huntly can breathe again, Lynch says. Locals can more readily access the town and find a park near the shops; parks that used to be taken up by traffic headed for Auckland or Hamilton.
There’s a lighter mood in town: ‘‘The attitude seems to have slowed down. You know, like the locals seem more relaxed, if I can say that,’’ she says.
‘‘I’ll stop at the coffee shop and sit, so that people can come in and chat to their councillor. The atmosphere seems to have slowed down a little bit, people not being in quite so much of a rush, because the town’s not packed.
Lynch says concerns that main street businesses would suffer didn’t eventuate.
‘‘I haven’t had any complaints from anyone. I’ve only had happiness from everybody who lives on Great South Road because it’s so much easier for them to get onto the road now.
‘‘We’re getting people moving here because it’s so easy to get out from Great South Road onto the motorway to go to Auckland, or at Taupiri to go to Hamilton.’’
One downside has been an increase in truck traffic to Huntly; now that there’s a bypass, it’s faster for rubbish contractors from Auckland to travel to the Huntly dump, rather than fight traffic in the big city.
‘‘The empty trucks and trailers shake the shit out of the houses,’’ says Wootton.
House prices have been going up. Industry is arriving from Auckland, and with Sleepyhead moving in just up the road at Ohinewai, there will be more jobs.
Harvey Norman has a distribution warehouse in Huntly, and there are quarries and a fertiliser works, all benefiting from the road changes.
Lynch says there are many inquiries from industries pondering relocating.
‘‘We haven’t reinvented ourselves, but we are getting big operations coming our way,’’ she says.
‘‘Speaking on behalf of Huntly, it’s worked out.’’
When Taupo¯ opted for a bypass, it was with a good deal of trepidation about the economic impact on the central North Island tourist town, says Taupo¯ District Council executive officer Gareth Green.
‘‘The reason for wanting to bypass was very much about reclaiming the town centre and reclaiming our lakefront,’’ he says.
‘‘You’d sit there having a wine or a beer in the lakefront bars, and there’d be stock trucks with all associated smells and aromas, running past between you and the lake.
‘‘At that point, one of the most common complaints we had when we did visitor surveys was around the noise and vibrations from nighttime traffic from our lakeside motels and hotels.
‘‘People staying the night were woken up . . . through the night with the noise and vibration.’’
In 2010 the East Taupo¯ Arterial bypass – fondly referred to locally as the ETA – opened, from north of Wairakei across the east side of town, to near Taupo¯ Airport.
Green says in hindsight, the south end could have been extended even further toward Tu¯ rangi, avoiding all residential areas. His tip to towns pondering bypasses is to go as far as you can.
‘‘We’ve probably got to the point, you know, we just wish that we’d done more, that we made the bypass longer,’’ he says.
Fears Taupo¯ would be ruined disappeared overnight.
People kept coming, people kept stopping, and people started lingering, because the town was more pleasant without the noise of trucks, and the wafting stench of cattle transporters.
‘‘What that means is that people in a nicer place . . . are spending more time, and therefore more money.’’
To help with what it calls ‘‘lingering longer’’ Taupo¯ District Council spent more than $1 million on a central town playground so parents can grab a coffee while the kids play.
Signs on the ETA were erected clearly pointing the way to town, and large retailers cannot move to the fringe of the bypass, under district plan moves to prevent the town centre being eroded.
Recently the bridge over the Waikato River at the north end of Taupo¯ reached the same volumes as when it was part of SH1, because of residential growth.
‘‘If it were still a state highway that would have been a congestion point. So it’s been positive for us,’’ Green says.
He points out it was always a myth that longhaul drivers were going to ‘‘stop and buy a handbag’’.
‘‘In reality those people have a dogged
‘‘At this stage internationally, nobody knows what the longer-term impact of Covid is likely to be. We’re still grappling with ‘will people return to the CBD? ‘ It seems like they will, but not to the extent that city centres expect.’’ Dr Maire´ ad de Ro´ iste
determination to get to their destination, and are not going to stop anyway.’’
With the bypass in place Julie McLeod has the job of reclaiming the lakefront, and merging it with the retail district. A length of what was once SH1 is going to be turned into lakeside park, from the bottom end of town where restaurants abound.
‘‘That bit of road is going to be covered over in green space and cultural space, creating this worldclass lakefront, in front of that whole dining area,’’ she says.
Without the bypass that could ‘‘absolutely not’’ have happened says McLeod, a resident for 27 years and general manager of Towncentre Taupo¯ .
‘‘The idea is that if you knew that this is the type of town Taupo¯ was going to become, you would never have put a road along there in the first place.
‘‘Taupo¯ is a very iconic destination, to be able to come and sit along our lakefront, drive along the lakefront, shop and dine on the lakefront, that’s a big draw card in and of itself.
Now, she says, Taupo¯ is a destination, rather than being part of a journey.
‘‘It’s just a much more pleasant place to be.’’ So there we have it, Paeka¯ ka¯ riki and co. Take it from Huntly and Taupo¯ : Good times lie just around the corner.