Massive milestone for East Auckland

As reported in the Times ‘Construction starts on $1.4b Eastern Busway’

The Eastern Busway is a potential game changer for transport in our area.

There's a lot of work to happen before it's finished so it's great to get it underway. The $1.4B project is being delivered over four stages, the second being Panmure to Pakuranga. This includes a new intersection at Panmure, an additional bridge along Lagoon Drive and new bus station at Pakuranga Plaza all connected by dedicated bus lanes.

Once completed, it will be capable of carrying up to 60 buses an hour and enable travel between Botany and Britomart by bus and train in under 40 minutes.

Changes coming to Pakuranga Road with mixed feedback from locals

AT Project Director, Duncan Humphrey

Last Wednesday night, over a hundred locals packed the Bucklands Beach Yacht Club for a public meeting on transport. Organised by Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown, the meeting was focused on some upcoming changes to Pakuranga Road proposed by Auckland Transport (AT) as during the construction of the Eastern Busway.

AT Project Director Duncan Humphrey was onsite to brief the crowd on the challenges and respond to questions. He started with an explanation of the project and its potential impact on our area.

The Eastern Busway has the potential to transform how we travel around East Auckland and the $1.4B project is being delivered over four stages, the first being Panmure to Pakuranga. This includes a new intersection at Panmure, an additional bridge along Lagoon Drive and new bus station at Pakuranga Plaza all connected by dedicated bus lanes. Once completed, it will be capable of carrying up to 60 buses an hour and enable travel between Botany and Britomart by bus and train in under 40 minutes.

Work is already underway with houses being demolished along the path but there’s a lot more to come over the two year construction period. The contractor has agreed to maintain two lanes of traffic in the peak direction, but there will still be disruption especially along Pakuranga Road heading into Panmure. This is the sixth busiest stretch of road in the country and serves as a vital link from East Auckland. AT believe that they need to reduce the traffic by 10% and are using a number of methods to try achieve this. Some will be implemented immediately while others are contingency plans.

The first of the immediate changes is a park and ride at Lord Elsmore Park with capacity for 332 cars. This will be served by dedicated buses which will go express through to Panmure and for the first few weeks these will be free to encourage uptake.

The second immediate change proposed is a transit lane down Pakuranga Road for the two year construction period. This will travel westwards from Dunrobin Place (Highland Park) through to Gossamer Drive, then from John Lane to Brampton Court (Pakuranga Plaza). The transit lane will take out the existing left hand lane and there’s a gap because Pakuranga Road is already too tight on this stretch of road.

I’ve seen the business case and modelling behind this decision which supports the concept, but it’s getting mixed feedback from locals. Simeon Brown ran a Facebook poll which showed that 43.9% supported the transit lane (from about 400 responses). When asked about the park and ride, an overwhelming 76% of people were supportive although many noted this would require it to be cheap or free.

By comparison, Howick Youth Council ran a survey which found that 70% of 97 respondents supported the transit lane. This went up for bus users (93%) and down for car users (56%) which is fair and higher than I would’ve expected. Support for the park and ride remained high with 72% overall support with little difference between bus (75%) or car users (69%).

At the meeting there were a lot of questions about public transport in general, particularly about the New Network. These issues are important and are worth talking about separately - I’ll cover these in another post but it’s worth noting that there are plenty of challenges in the public transport. A number of locals present voiced concerns about Gossamer Drive and the issues that already exist turning left onto Pakuranga Road, with others expressing the same about Cascades Road.

AT will be running active monitoring which means they’ll be watching the traffic very closely and making adjustments as required. This includes live adjustments to traffic light phases to compensate for issues and they may explore options such as variable speed signs. Exactly how quickly AT responds to issues is something that we won’t know until these changes take effect.

And we won’t need to wait long - this is all expected to happen around the 15 April.

Will a transit lane for Pakuranga Road be a help or a hindrance?

As any local will know, Pakuranga Road is an extremely busy place every day and with the incoming construction work for AMETI Eastern Busway, this is going to get worse.

Auckland Transport is taking some action including encouraging people to take alternative transport, alter their hours or routes. But with significant work happening in the area these won’t be enough. To help, Auckland Transport is proposing some big changes:

• a transit lane for Pakuranga Road

• a park and ride at Lord Elsmore Park

• increased bus, ferry (Half Moon Bay) and train capacity (ex Panmure)

• increased communication and options.

Most of these are pretty uncontroversial, but the transit lane has been met with some concern. Restricting a lane of traffic to only vehicles with 2 or 3 people will impact a lot of people and we need to get this right.

I contacted Auckland Transport and requested a copy of the studies along with business cases and reports. There’s a lot to work through and I’ve done my best to summarise them but feel free to read the full documents attached.

Surveys of Pakuranga Road found that 87% of vehicles heading west were single occupant and remaining 13% of vehicles carried 24% of people.

Modelling shows that doing nothing will make traffic worse (about 3 minutes longer for everyone) as will a T3 transit lane (about a minute longer for cars, but 40 seconds faster for buses). A T2 lane should reduce travel time for everyone (a minute for general vehicles and 100 seconds for buses).

People who use the transit lane (by busing or carpooling) will get the most benefit but it will help those using the remaining two lanes. Effectively this needs that nearly half of people using Pakuranga Road will benefit from a T2, while a T3 or doing nothing will make it worse for most people.

Obviously there's a cost to these changes - the estimate for everything (including park and ride) is $5m with nearly $2m is for the transit lane. This doesn’t take into account the money that will be recovered via public transport which should reduce the costs by about a million. The benefits over the 2 year construction period are estimated at over $8m while the costs of not taking any action are estimated at $16m.

The devil is always in the detail and there’s plenty more detail to come with the designs yet to be finalised. What is clear is that we need to do something or things will get worse on Pakuranga Road.

This Wednesday (27 March) there’s a public meeting organised by local MP Simeon Brown. Auckland Transport are going to present on the plans and I’m sure there will be an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback.

Construction and destruction underway

As part of the changes required for the AMETI Eastern Busway, Auckland Transport has begun removing 61 houses along Pakuranga Road.

Like many, I was concerned about the loss of housing especially considering the current housing market. Investing in transport is an absolute must for East Auckland and we need to get this busway built so we can move onto other transport projects, but it's important we make good decisions.

In NZ, you can request information from government at either central (Official Information Act or OIA) or local level (Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act or LGOIMA). So I contacted Auckland Transport using the FYI.org.nz website which helps track the requests and makes it available for others to see (reducing duplicate requests).

I'm pleased to say I got a pretty quick. Here are the key points:
- houses where offered to "mana whenua and to Housing New Zealand however both parties declined ... due to logistical reasons and the cost of removal vs the property condition";
- contractor is aiming to relocate properties where possible;
- "vast majority of buildings" are unable to be re-located due to "condition and structural stability";
- waste minimisation conditions in place with the contractor;
- up to 90% of non-asbestos contaminated materials will be recycled (mostly metals or concrete and bricks);
- remainder will be sent to a plant that uses the waste to generate electricity.

It's good to see that relocation and reuse of these houses was considered and the materials are being recycled where possible.

The Eastern Busway is a $1.4B project which won't be finished until 2026 so there's a lot more to happen. Minimising the impact on locals during a construction project of this scale will be a challenge. I'll be keeping an eye on progress and will provide updates as I get them.