There was an interesting article on the Puhoi-Wellsford “holiday highway” in the NZ Herald today – which notes the enormous difficulties NZTA is facing in finding a route that is feasible for the Warkworth-Wellsford section through Dome Valley.
Unstable ground around Dome Valley north of Auckland threatens to rip the wheels off the Government’s “road of national significance” from Puhoi to Wellsford.
Transport Agency northern highways manager Tommy Parker has admitted concerns about the feasibility of completing the road as a four-lane expressway past Warkworth.
“There are alternatives outside the Dome, but you are still going the other side of the valley and we have a lot of ground movement,” he told the Herald.
“Every time you put a spade in the ground up there you’ve got to put in retaining structures, or tunnels or something.
“The level of ground movement is more than we had anticipated, which makes huge problems and huge costs.”
While I don’t know the geotechnical details, it is pretty obvious from simply driving through the Dome Valley that it would be hugely difficult to construct another, expressway standard, road through there. With the majority of the project’s funding being allocated to the Puhoi-Warkworth section, it seems that NZTA are being left to achieve something that’s pretty impossible with the section further north.
Tommy Parker later on outlines something quite interesting – that NZTA are considering whether the road really needs to be four lanes:
Meeting a target for starting the 20km Warkworth-Wellsford leg in 2016 would be tougher.
Asked how it could be completed within a $670 million estimate, when the shorter Puhoi-Warkworth leg would cost $980 million, Mr Parker said it depended to what standard it was built. That included whether it was built with four lanes or two.
Of a suggestion that the agency should settle for providing safety upgrades to the existing State Highway 1 through Dome Valley, he said: “That is an option that is being considered along with the others.”
But this doesn’t seem to have pleased Trucking Transport Minister Steven Joyce, who says that it needs to meet the standard of all RoNS: a four lane expressway. Although interestingly even he is now considering whether it might be smarter to stick with the existing route rather than trying to find another alignment:
But Transport Minister Steven Joyce insisted later that nothing short of a four-lane road would do.
“I don’t have a strong view as to whether the road between Warkworth and Wellsford is built on the current route or a new alignment,” he said.
“But it is crucial for it to be built to roads of national significance standard – a four-lane divided expressway – and that remains the Government’s expectation.”
The article also talks in some detail about “Operation Lifesaver“, which I helped the CBT put together and present to the ARC’s Transport Committee last year:
The safety upgrade idea was raised last year by the Campaign for Better Transport, which suggested choosing between two sets of improvements to the Puhoi to Wellsford route costing $160 million and $320 million. Both included a $50 million bypass of Warkworth and safety upgrades including extensive median barriers for Dome Valley and other black spots on a route where 44 people have died since 2000.
The more expensive would include a realignment of the difficult Schedewys Hill north of Puhoi.
Campaign convener Cameron Pitches noted a cash-flow problem which the Transport Agency says has forced it to delay $15 million of improvements to Warkworth’s Hill St intersection with SHI, a traffic bottleneck, by at least 12 months.
“For us the obvious solution is instead of spending $1 billion on a new toll road to Warkworth, let’s just look at working with what we’ve got and making that safer,” he said.
One thing that I find really amusing is, as part of the review of the City Rail Link project, government officials absolutely slammed what they considered to be a lack of proper assessment of alternatives to the rail project. Yet when it comes to their own (pretty unpopular) pet project, where’s the robust assessment of alternatives?
Hypocrisy. Utter hypocrisy.
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It was a very interesting article and I suspect that even the NZTA don’t want to build the thing but are being forced to by the government, they know it will end up costing substantially more than they have budgeted for but if they announce that we all know even with the best massaging they have already done, the business case will be shot to pieces. It also confirms what we have mostly assumed and that is any RoNS has to be at least a 4 lane expressway which means the other four that the government is considering adding to the list would also have to be built to this level, I think this is the first time we have had this confirmed.
What does that mean for Cambridge to Taupo?
This is nothing to do with providing a link between Northland & Auckland, or a holiday highway, it is about converting $3b of farmland around Warkworth into $30b of housing subdivision – North Shore MKII.
Unfortunately it will take $18b of rate payer/taxpayer money in infrastructure to achieve this. This is the start of an epic rip-off that will make state asset sales look small-time stuff for amateurs.
Bloomberg had an interesting article a few days ago about cost overruns and benefit overestimates for transport projects, both rail and road: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-08/too-many-public-works-built-on-rosy-scenarios-virginia-postrel.html
Regarding geology:
“It’s nothing new that geology is difficult,” Flyvbjerg says. “We know that geology is difficult. No matter. It’s ignored in project after project. Therefore, the problem is not geology itself but the fact that we disregard geology.”
Which is an observation that applies to a CBD rail tunnel as well as a Dome Valley motorway.
Well, who’d have thought it?
There is a fundamental problem with this road and that is that someone built Alpurt to finish in “a paddock near Puhoi” to coin Mr Joyce’s classic phrase. If there had been any degree of forward planning and if the intention had truly been to provide a strategic link to Northland, then it wouldn’t have been built anywhere near Puhoi. It would have been constructed at least 10km further west and then continued on a route probably even further west than the existing rail track. But of course that was never the intention.
Mike Lee is completely right. It is a “holiday highway” through and through. I don’t believe that there ever was an intention to build this road any further than Wellsford/Te Hana, with links through to Omaha/Matakana at Warkworth and Mangawhai at Te Hana, specifically to service the developments in these areas. And yes, Zeus is right on the button. Most of the farmers in the area north and east of Puhoi and Warkworth have seen their rates go through the roof. So much so that their only choice is to sell up to property developers.
Returning to the article, it beggars belief that anyone would think that the Puhoi to Warkworth section would meet with any less geological problems. The proposed route is frightening in it’s complexity, with huge viaducts and cuttings that will transform the whole area and will prove very difficult to complete anywhere near the budget. There is one hell of a fight coming up. I’m looking forward to the challenge.
Bob – you have hit the nail on the head here. If successive governments had been really looking ahead in a “long term strategic” sense, in terms of a high standard intercity four lane route for SH1 up into Northland, we would have be building closer to the west coast – along or near the current SH16 corridor. The terrain and geology are much easier for road building along this side and you would mitigate dependence on the AHB by building a strong west coast route.
Basically what has happened is that the Northern Motorway has been extended in a piecemeal fashion northwards from the AHB to cater for expanding suburban development up the Eastern coastline, without giving much thought to where things might end up. This all worked well until the motorway reached Albany and pressure built for the next extension northwards (ALPURT) in the late ’90s. Northwards from here the hills close in towards the coast for 50km or so and are definitely not well suited for highway construction. This was as obvious in the 1950’s as it is now.
Really, many of the problems with puford can be attributed to the decision to build ALPURT. By doing this they have basically painted themselves into a corner – the NZTA and predecessors have sunk so much money into getting the motorway to where it is now, there is no real choice (from the perspective of a road engineer) but to stay the course.
However “staying the course” doesn’t have to mean a motorway. Do the safety upgrades and Wellsford bypass, as admin and many others advocate, but I’d also look at some easy upgrades to SH16. A bypass of Helensville, easing of some of the windy sections and some extra passing lanes would go a long way and probably not cost more than $150-200 mill. This could be staged over time so as not to take money away from other projects.
Josh that hypocrisy needs to be highlighted and bought out into the public arena.
It is election year after all!
The original ideas I saw on this very blog had the route much further to the West. Seems like Joshua knew more than the NZTA engineers!
This is rather worrying. I am not sure what the condition of SH1 through Dome Valley is currently, but other roads built in areas with geotechnical difficulties end up costing NZTA and council’s huge amounts of money to maintain. These roads include SH35 north of Tokomaru Bay, SH4 north of Whanagnui which are built on some of the most unstable land in the country. Much of these roads have 30/50kph areas where the road is uneven and not suitable for high speeds.
Yes there will be a huge cost in building the road, but I now have to wonder what the maintenance costs will be too keep the road up to expressway standard.
Interesting also that the road seems to have been split in two now. Makes the initial stage seem cheaper and apart are no where near the cost of the rail link.
This is a really interesting discussion. I have taken the liberty of placing a link on to the CBT facebook group in the hope of getting a wider audience.
http://www.facebook.com/jennifer.northover#!/groups/217592808264929?ap=1
@admin did you get a chance to chat to Tommy Parker or anyone else at NZTA as per my OIA request?
No they never contacted me about it, strangely.
Interestingly enough, internally (i.e. within NZTA) the philosophy for the RONS was “four lanes, cheap as chips”… Make of that what you will, but I will add that this was brought up when the question of what safety standards were appropriate for the new RONS was raised (i.e. grade-seperated intechanges vs at grade etc…)
The question I have (as a practising roading engineer) is: should we be compromising safety (and provision for non-vehicle modes) to achieve 4-lanes?
I suspect alternate 2+1 would be a better solution to the Dome valley geotech issues…