I’m sure pretty much everyone reading the title to this blog post immediately went “what the heck is NorSGA?” It sounds like some sort of paper-pulp company from Scandinavia, but what it actually stands for is the “Northern Strategic Growth Area”. It is the area around Westgate, Massey North and Hobsonville that has been highlighted for a lot of future urban development – particularly providing a greater number of employment opportunities for the northwest part of Auckland. Its location is shown in the map below – taken from the Auckland Plan discussion document:
The red ring shows the rough location of NorSGA. A more detailed map of its potential staging was discussed by the Auckland Future Vision Committee yesterday:
I can certainly understand why Waitakere City Council was so keen on progressing the development of this area as an employment hub – because Waitakere City in general had relatively few employment opportunities: forcing most of its residents to undertake lengthy commutes elsewhere in the region to get to work every day. It’s an interesting point of debate, now that we’re one city, whether developing jobs in this far-flung corner of the urban area should still be a priority or whether we should be looking to have a greater concentration of employment activity.
However, it seems that we are well down the path of having significant development in this corner of Auckland – to the extent of having master planned street networks laid out:
It also seems that Waitakere City Council committed to spending a rather large amount of money on infrastructure upgrades to service this area:
I’m sure it will come as no surprise that the big question I have about this whole future development is quite simply: where’s the public transport?It would seem that the Auckland Plan envisages this as one of the city’s primary growth areas over the next 20-30 years, it seems that Waitakere City Council advanced development in this area to a significant extent and that a lot of public money is going to go into ensuring the development is adequately provided with various types of infrastructure. But how are all these people going to get to and from work? How can we ensure the business park areas don’t become another public transport wasteland like East Tamaki, and how can we ensure the residential areas don’t become another PT wasteland like Flat Bush, Botany Town Centre and Dannemora?
The answer seems fairly clear to me, and links in with a key project that I have promoted for quite some time now: a Northwest Busway between Westgate and the city centre along State Highway 16. The image below shows the route of the busway.
Even at its closest point there is almost three kilometres between the busway and the railway line – so I don’t think they’d be competing for the same public transport market. Strangely, ARTA never seemed particularly supportive of the busway idea and getting the Regional Land Transport Strategy to designate SH16 as part of the “Rapid Transit Network” rather than the “Quality Transit Network” somewhat fizzled out.
But now we have a new council, which has put a lot of emphasis on development in the northwest of the city, I wonder whether it’s time we took a fresh look at the Northwest Busway idea. Unfortunately in the meanwhile NZTA is blasting ahead with their plans to waste $800 million on widening the Northwest Motorway – a perfect opportunity to put the busway through is being lost before our eyes.
To answer the question, yes we definitely should be building a busway along SH16 and we should be planning it now while we have the chance.
I’ve always thought this development was ridiculous and is simply repeating the mistakes of Flat Bush in West Auckland, what is more worrying is that a lot of the commercial development is being masterplanned by the same people who brought us such urban design hits as WestGate, a development where you have to drive from shop to shop.
I think Auckland Council should be having a major rethink of all these projects they’ve ‘inherited’ rather than simply proceeding with them. In total they plan to spend close to a billion on this and other similar autocentric developments without a second thought.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10717184
Somewhat surprisingly I think a rail line might actually be more realistic here, that is if a busway is not built as part of the NW widening.
My reasoning for this is as follows. The widening of the causway between Te Atatu and Waterview for more motorway lanes will also involve widening it for a large unpaved strip to filter roadway run off, i.e. there will be a good 15 or 20m of open land along the seaward side of the causway to catch dirt, debris and filter stormwater. This sounds just perfect for a busway, however to build a paved and sealed bus roadway on it would negate it’s original function, so a busway after the fact would require even more widening. On the other hand a railway is built on a bed of well-drained permeable ballast, not sealed road. So it might be perfectly feasible to run a railway in this filter strip and indeed the pile of rail ballast might actually improve the filtering properties of the structure.
Of course this doesn’t make the rest of the route particularly easy, especially the city side connections to the rail network. I suppose this could be a link to the western in the vicinity of Kingsland, a tunnel down to the CBD loop from Newton Gully, or maybe a brand new cross town tunnel. Not exactly cheap. However at the other end a rail link on the NW out to Kumeu and Waimauku would provide a great direct link from these towns to the central city.
Nick, consider a rail line going south at Waterview, as a cutting through Unitec (1.2km), and joining NAL via a cut & cover tunnel along Seaview Terrace (0.6km). This brings Unitec campus in as a connection to Eastern services & UoA Merton road campus. The 77ha site at Waterview has more scale than the Eastern site, and is potentially the largest acedemic /innovation hub in Auckland but currently access is the weak link.
I think Unitec would be better served by a tram running from the CBD down Great North Road to Pt Chev, to Unitec then linking to Mt Albert Station. I would argue that it needs to link with K Road Station, then go up Queen St. Then the Ponsonby route would be separate, running from Britomart – Tank Farm – Three Lamps – Ponsonby – either Newton or K Rd Station.
Isn’t this why we are having a spatial plan. To avoid gross acts of stupidity by omission.
To be honest the extra development does increase the logic of the road widening. Still a busway would probably still be the better option.
Sadly its not discussed much outsider this blog
I’m a bit sad that Hobsonville is being built on. It was originally a seaplane base in an era where Britain planned a network of seaplanes shuttling people and post around the empire. That was a losing strategy when Douglas invented the DC3 which was faster and had longer range, but the Empire kept on at it until World War 2 when both Australia and NZ found that runways on land and modern American aircraft were necessary for defence against the Japanese. The last seaplanes were retired in the 1960s.
It’s a big part of NZ’s aviation history and I think it deserves better than some boat yards. It’s sort of like NASA selling Cape Kennedy so it could be redeveloped. Maybe a national museum of science or something similar, with lots of open space around it?
The appropriate public transportation will be considered after the developers are gone. Isn’t that how it works in NZ?
One thing you do notice with a few of these images (particularly the second one), is just how much land they take for the motorway designation now compared to in the past. The existing SH16 (motorway and current rural part) is pretty small in comparison to the new parts, especially around the interchanges. It also looks like they are planning to put a town centre right next to the motorway junction which doesn’t sound all that inviting.
Matt it’s typical for NZTA to designate a large area surrounding the motorway during construction (after all they need accessways, construction yards etc.) and then to ‘pull back’ that designation significantly post construction.
So we can expect the designated area to narrow down significantly once the project is opened (which is in just a few months’ time I think).
Yes September, all recent motorway projects seem to have been completed quite far ahead of schedule which leads me to believe the contractors/planners are deliberately building in quite a bit of project excess.
I favour putting in rail rather than the situation we now have on the shore where we’ve paid a lot of money for infrastructure that is going to reach capacity long before it’s design life is over, and gets in the way of building rail.
I don’t know if it’d be easier to have the rail on the north or south side of the motorway.
Cut & cover across the corner of Chamberlin Park & through Fowlds Park may be easier & shorter than through Unitec, where the buildings & topography might get in the way. A station between Gt Nth Rd Waterview & Carington Rd would give sufficient access to Unitec, Waterview, Pt Chev. Another station could give access to Motat & Western Springs Speedway.
Or rail could follow the motorway to around Newton Rd, where an 800m long tunnel could connect to K’Rd Station.
Or rail could run un a longer tunnel under Ponsonby.
Im not so sure about a north western busway.
If I break it down into areas….
Pt chev and grey lynn- these places already have good bus links to the city, the busway would be competing against other buses that can pick people up closer to their homes, and use smaller roads. The north shore busway does well but there are no other buses like the “outer loop” for instance, that will compete with a north western busway by going along jervois rd or great north rd.
te atatu to pt chev,- mostly water and industrial
Westgate-massey-and te atatu. – will get good patronage but i dont know if it will be enough to justify a busway the whole length of the motorway.
So my suggestion would be to see the new area of NorSGA as a north shore transport problem. if you take a straight line from hobsonville to the city it actually cuts through a fair chunk of the north shore around chatswood and birkenhead. So put it in the same basket as greenhithe and the Onewa rd problem rather than taking it down the north western motorway. My hope would be for a rail line from here to greenhithe (joining trains from albany) and then to the western part of the shore before crossing to the city solving north shore, second harbour crossing NorSGA transport issues with one albeit massive project. But whatever solution is found imo putting it through the north shore would be more effective as it would solve a number of transport problem areas with one hit rather than separating resources
Shouldn’t just think of this as a CBD to NW problem. Just as important are services from interchanges at Henderson and New Lynn to Westgate. Therefore I think bus-lanes on Lincoln road are also a must long-term.
Waitakere City Council wanted this area to be an employment hub as the West is lacking major industrial areas like Manakau, Auckland City and the North Shore have.
Also this busway can be staged, however the Waterview Connection and NW widening MUST be designed with it in mind or it will become prohibitively expensive to have bus lanes in that section.
Just as important is the urban design of Westgate itself, if it is another Albany PT will not work well, as is much harder to design efficient services for scattered employment. Offices and higher density employment needs to be closest to the town centre, with lower density employment like warehousing further away.
Yes the North Western needs designation as an RTN immediately. But so does the Lincoln Rd to Upper Harbour cross ‘burbs route. At this stage that could be an AMETI-type middle of the road grade separate bus lane. This would link Henderson station directly to the Northern Busway. Of course they have just widened the Upper Harbour bridge and that would have been the best time to do this, but it isn’t too late, cyccling and walking need abetter deal out of what is happening up there too. We are getting this sprawl so let’s make it connected, and build now for the future potential use and the area will grow better and more securely. See it’s not all about the CBD…..
Iwould talk to Penny. And Sandra coney. They should be right behind this idea. Hopefully it won’t take 16 years to come to fruition – like North Shore busway.
What concerns me is the multi million dollars of ratepayers’ money being paid to the NORSGA developer who has acquired already a dubious name with his elderly creditors when Westgate shops were built. He had then borrowed 1 billion dollars from the Bank of Scotland! Now ACC are paying huge amounts in excess of true value for his road through Westgate shops and for the infrastructure of the North Massey development at the same time being totally unhelpful to smaller private developers in the Massey area. Now his mega sized apartment block has been approved in Milford and is going ahead despite thousands of North Shore residents objecting by petition to this huge apartment building (see Aucklander in Herald, today, Dec 1st). These deals are done with council in “secret meetings” which not all the councillors agree with. It is really getting to scandalous proportions re wastage of ratepayers’ money and there is no industry at Massey North to warrant such an extra large subdivision and the millions it will cost to provide transport on top of $315 million projected spending by council on the town centre out there to new residents. Why is council incurring such huge debt to help fund this particular private developer?!
Dianne, gather up a few like minded folk and start pestering your Councilor and Local Board members. All of them.
Why are they building a tower block in Milford when it makes sense to develop Takapuna more? I could see that one day Takapuna will have a spur from the busway (or LRT with luck and no Maggie Barry). Some things never change – right?
As for the busway, if they build it, and put a station at Te Atatu, I will use it. End of story! I have lived in Te Atatu for 2 1/2 years and have used the bus once – and it was late. If there was a station down the road I would use it quite a bit. Unless there is a shuttle type of service available, it will need to be a park’n'ride. It doesn’t need to have a lot of parking because it would mainly affect weekend and off peak users. Peak users have frequent services available to them anyway.