Mount Victoria Tunnel

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The Mount Victoria Tunnel was officially opened on 12 October 1931 in the New Zealand capital city of Wellington. The tunnel stretches from the suburb of Hataitai to the city suburb of Mount Victoria. It runs for a total of 623 metres (slightly more than a third of a mile) and is 5 metres (16.4 ft) in height.

The tunnel was built in 15 months^[1] by the Hansford and Mills Construction Company. The entire project cost around £132,000 and greatly reduced travel time between the Eastern Suburbs and the central business district of Wellington. Construction employed a standard tunnel-excavation technique in which two teams of diggers begin on either side of the obstacle to be tunnelled through, eventually meeting in the centre.

The initial breakthrough (when the two separate teams of diggers met) occurred at 2.30pm on May 31, 1930, and the first people to pass through the breakthrough were tunnellers Philip Gilbert and Alfred Graham. The tunnel was opened officially for public use by the mayor of Wellington, Thomas Charles Hislop, in October 1931.

Although the tunnel has been eclipsed in terms of features and amenities by more recent tunnels around the country, such as the Terrace Motorway Tunnel, the Mount Victoria Tunnel was the first road tunnel in New Zealand to be mechanically ventilated. Around 32,000 vehicles pass through it each day. The tunnel also accommodates pedestrians, who use an elevated ramp to the side of the roadway. In the late 1970s, a number of crime incidents resulted in an alarm system being installed based on buttons spaced along the length of the pedestrian ramp - the system was removed several years later, as it proved ineffective. Recent additions include new lighting, CCTV cameras, brighter cleanable side panels and pollution control. These have significantly improved safety in the tunnel.

There has been a long standing designation for a second parallel tunnel to the north, in order to relieve peak period congestion resulting from lane merges at both ends of the tunnel. A pilot tunnel was bored through in 1974 to investigate the technical feasibility and still exists, although the eastern end has been bricked up and the western end lies on private property. Plans to build the second tunnel paralleled the original plan to complete the Wellington Urban Motorway to the tunnel to provide a motorway bypass of the whole of central Wellington. The second tunnel component was shelved indefinitely in 1981 when budget cuts meant that a scaled-down motorway extension was proposed that would terminate at the existing tunnel.

Since that date there have been no serious proposals to duplicate the existing tunnel, although cost estimates for such work were at $40 million in the mid 1980s. Traffic lights were installed at the end of the city approach to the tunnel to ease congestion and improve safety at the Basin Reserve roundabout. Mt Victoria Tunnel became part of State Highway 1 in 2001 when Transit New Zealand designated the road from Wellington Airport to the Basin Reserve a State Highway (and therefore no longer under the control of or needing funding from the Wellington City Council). Transit New Zealand has no plans in the next ten years to duplicate the tunnel, but plans to investigate work to upgrade the city approaches around the Basin Reserve, including a possible flyover to Buckle Street, to reduce congestion at the city end of the tunnel and around the Basin Reserve. A study is currently underway (Ngauranga to Airport study) investigating the long term traffic options for the route.

The tunnel currently is a traffic bottleneck in the morning peak from around 7.30 to 9.00am on the Hataitai side with traffic sometimes backing up over 1 km and in the afternoon peak between 5 and 6pm on the city side with queuing back around 0.5 km. Buses to the eastern suburbs bypass this congestion by using the much older single-lane Hataitai bus tunnel.

[edit] Trivia

During World War II, the government planned to use the Mount Victoria Tunnel as an air raid shelter if Wellington were attacked. However, the plan was scrapped as the tunnel was thought to be too vulnerable to assault from either side by hostile troops.

A well-known local story revolves around a murder that may have occurred during the construction of the Mount Victoria Tunnel. The story involves a young woman named Phylis Simons and her lover. Phylis's lover is said to have buried her alive in the fill from the tunnel. The story was later covered in the Wellington newspapers. Upon learning of the murder, police ordered workers to undo their work in order to find the victim's body.^[2]

The tunnel is well known in Wellington as being the location of "the beeping game", in which motorists take turns at sounding their horns as they go through the tunnel, often in response to the tooting of other drivers. This is particularly popular after 5pm on Friday nights.

[edit] Notes

[edit] Sources

• The New Zealand Herald Archives, courtesy of the Central Wellington Library Newspaper Archives.
• The Dominion Post Archives, courtesy of the Central Wellington Library Newspaper Archives.