Eastern Transport Corridor

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The Eastern Transport Corridor in Auckland, New Zealand, is a transport reserve along a strip of land and water some of which is occupied by housing, commerce, industry and local roads. It runs adjacent to the North Island Main Trunk Railway freight and passenger railway line, but is earmarked for major transport intensification to improve links from central Auckland to the north-eastern half of Manukau city - suburbs such as Pakuranga and Howick.

A strategy study in 2002 confirmed the need for an Eastern Transport Corridor, for a variety of reasons including the need to make suburban streets safer and less polluted.

In March 2004 Auckland City Mayor John Banks proposed a NZ$4b scheme with (inter alia) 13 motorway lanes through Hobson Bay. There was substantial community and political resistance to the motorway scheme, largely due to the extreme cost of the proposal (equivalent to four years of the entire country's transport funding budget) and the impact it would have on a number of established neighbourhoods and several environmentally sensitive areas. A revised plan published on 25 August 2004 reduced the number of lanes substantially, reducing the financial and ecological impact, which Banks said he hoped would please the opponents. However the costs and impact were still high and at that point the corridor was fast becoming a political boondoggle. The proposed motorway was one of the principal points of contention in the 2004 local body elections and contributed to the defeat of Banks.

The Auckland City Council transport and urban linkages committee decided on 10 December 2004 to scrap the planned motorway component in favour of improved public transport and increased capacity on existing local roads. However the transport reserve remains in place, allowing for the motorway to potentially be undertaken at some point in the future if it becomes economically and politically feasible. Additionally, the Council has undertaken to begin a program to purchase a small number of the most affected properties along the route.

Due to the very high cost of the project, the roading component of the ETC would not be likely to proceed without some form of tolling or urban road pricing or a massive re-organisation of national transport funding priorities.

[edit] Alternative proposals

Based on this strong opposition to a major link through this area of eastern Auckland, the new AMETI (Auckland-Manukau Eastern Transport Initiative) project now intends to primarily improve the connections of this area towards the south-east (Manukau City), via less problematic routes. The new roads and public transport links are to serve intensified residential and mixed developments like the Mount Wellington Quarry area.^[1]