Spaghetti junction stadium: Is motorway jungle best fit for Auckland?

Wednesday, 6 June 2018

Greater Auckland has drawn a mock-up of a potential spaghetti junction stadium using Bilbao's San Mames stadium as a placeholder.

A stadium overlooking a tangle of motorways might be the location for Auckland's mooted billion-dollar stadium, a transport expert has said.

Matt Lowrie, editor of the Greater Auckland blog, said he was not in favour of an inner-city stadium but, if one were built, it should not be on the waterfront either.

He said a waterfront location would be a waste of valuable land, adding stadiums, casinos and convention centres don't need sea views.

'There's an assumption that it has to be on the waterfront,' he said.

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The idea of a waterfront stadium was brought up more than a decade ago as a preferred location for a stadium by then-mayor Dick Hubbard.

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'Except for the couple of times a year when there are major events on, they tend to be large, lifeless places.'

A spaghetti junction stadium would be within walking distance of a number of neighbourhoods.

Lowrie said stadiums needed to be well connected to transport networks so putting one in the middle of two motorways and close to multiple railway lines could work.

He has identified a 60,000m2 plot of land between State Highway 1 and State Highway 16 within Auckland's infamous 'spaghetti junction'.

He said the suggestion was half tongue in-cheek but several locations outlined in a council-commissioned $1m PWC report into the stadium would be worse.

'It's pretty absurd to spend $1m and not even get an outcome of where the stadium should be,' he said.

A waterfront stadium would cause significant disruption to public transport users as rail lines would need to be raised and other changes made, Lowrie added.

But a spaghetti junction stadium would be within walking distance of cafes and bars on K Road and Ponsonby.

Lowrie said the Central Rail Link and the light rail network from the airport would both be close by and the location was within walking distance of a number of neighbourhoods.

'The site would be one of the most accessible in all of Auckland,' he said.

Six locations had been suggested, including Wynyard Park and Victoria Park, but a waterfront stadium on Quay Street was understood to be the preferred option.

Constructing a raised stadium in the middle of spaghetti junction would be expensive, he said, but could be comparable to the $1-1.5bn cost mooted for a waterfront stadium.

Work on that site would also cause minimal disruption to motorists and would not involve any changes to the motorways, he said.

He added Auckland needed a cultural shift to recognise that it was now like other large cities around the world, such as Tokyo and New York, where land and space were at a premium.

The Gate Tower building in Osaka, Japan was built around a motorway with an elevated road passing through the fifth and seventh floors and some buildings have been built over the top of the Trans-Manhattan expressway in New York, he said.

'If the idea of a stadium is going to keep coming up then Auckland should think outside of the box.'