This story first appeared in the May issue of DieselTalk – CLICK HERE to download the magazine FREE
Every working day around 4100 heavy trucks travel down Grafton Gully, heading to and from Ports of Auckland in the central city. That’s approximately 170 large trucks per hour travelling along Stanley St and The Strand to service the Port’s 24/7 operation.
But for Aucklanders concerned about the slow progress to improve one of the most heavily congested corridors in the central city – Stanley St and The Strand – that’s barely 10% of the problem.
By far the largest user and contributor to congestion in Grafton Gully are the nearly 40,000 vehicles – mainly commuters – travelling along Tamaki Drive to and from eastern seaside suburbs (Mission Bay, St Heliers) to link into the motorway at Grafton Gully for getting to west Auckland or North Shore destinations.
The Stanley St – Strand route is crucial for Auckland, yet it is failing to serve any of its users well.
Trucks experience a large variance in travel time, general traffic congestion is getting worse, and it’s forcing many commuters to seek alternative routes and local traffic, including pedestrians and cyclists, face constant risk.
With residential growth intensifying in eastern suburbs, an annual increase of some 7-9% in general vehicle trips through the corridor is occurring. Without action, congestion delays are expected to increase by 10-15 minutes in coming years adding costs to people and the economy.
For freight operators the congestion cost in Grafton Gully is becoming a big number. Operating one truck is approximately $100/hour or $1.66/min. A 10-minute delay for, say, 2000 trucks a day equals around $50,000, or approaching a $20 million congestion cost per year, for the freight sector alone.
The Grafton Gully improvements were first proposed in the mid-1990s and envisaged a three-stage project to extend the motorway to the port. The first two stages completed 10 years ago, extended the motorway to the intersection of Parnell Rise and Stanley St.
This has left the Stage 3 link of around one kilometre in limbo even though NZTA already owns most of the land required to complete the project. It means that Port and other through traffic has no option to using The Strand and Stanley St to get access to the motorway network.
Through work by the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and its partner organisations in the Auckland Business Forum seeking action, two critical problems in current thinking are at the heart of the years of inaction.
The first mistake has been to view the Stage 3 project as an extension of the motorway to the Port. Traffic counts clearly show that the need to upgrade Grafton Gully is not driven by the 10% of port-related traffic, but the 70-80% of non-port through traffic that uses the route to access the motorway to and from the eastern suburbs via Tamaki Drive.
Rather than the project focusing on connecting the motorway to the Port, its primary purpose needs to be to complete Auckland’s motorway network access to the eastern side of the central city – so that the large volume of general through traffic wanting access to the motorway can do so directly from Quay Street-Tamaki Drive, without having to use The Strand, Stanley St and other inner city streets.
The second big problem is a lack of shared vision between stakeholders about what future transport and/or land use investment to prioritise in The Strand Stanley St area.
NZTA, KiwiRail and Ngati Whatua all have significant land holdings in the area. Auckland Transport, Auckland Council land planning, Ports of Auckland as well as the Waitemata Local Board are stakeholders.
The lack of shared vision and decisive leadership among these stakeholders has meant inaction to design a project and secure funding. For example, the project has low priority in NZTA’s investment programme, despite compelling evidence, I suggest, that it would support Auckland’s economic growth and productivity.
Our advocacy to stakeholders is making progress – they are now working together to develop a plan of action for the area, which should soon create more certainty around the timing of transport infrastructure and its design.
Our idea is for an underpass from the motorway to Quay St in a way that avoids The Strand and the congestion at the Parnell Rise/ Stanley St intersection. Other ideas are for grade separation of the Parnell Rise – Stanley St intersection and a multiway along The Strand designed to separate through traffic from local traffic. Another possibility is a combination between underpass, fly over (the railway lines) and grade separation.
Importantly, addressing the corridor would also open up a large number of sites for development/ redevelopment within the area, many of which are currently occupied by comparatively low value land uses.
As I say, progress is happening, but it needs to be accelerated. With completion looming to the Waterview Tunnels and other major SH projects, we are encouraging NZTA to give serious attention to completing its work in Grafton Gully within the next five years.
Accepting that the Port will stay on Auckland’s waterfront for the foreseeable future, I strongly encourage freight sector interests to join the chorus of champions seeking priority completion of what is clearly a critical gap in Auckland’s strategic transport network.
