Calls for tunnel road crossing after crash on Auckland’s Harbour Bridge causes five-hour delays

Monday, 2 September 2019

Traffic heading into Auckland city at a standstill after a crash near Auckland's Harbour Bridge.

A second Auckland harbour crossing would prevent a single accident backing up traffic for hours across the entire region, an expert says.

Motorists faced massive delays on Monday morning after a truck overturned and burst into flames around 4.45am on Auckland’s Harbour Bridge.

Congestion remained high for around five hours after the incident, affecting commuters from central Auckland to the Upper Harbour Highway and northwestern routes.

Experts say more than one harbour crossing is necessary to prevent gridlock when a crash happens on the harbour bridge.

AUT University engineering Professor John Tookey said a second tunnel road crossing, as has already been mooted, would ensure Auckland would not be hit to the same extent as a result of a single incident.

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'The fact of the matter is, if you have a tunnel somewhere else, then you've got traffic going through the tunnel ongoing uninterrupted during these incidents,” he said.

“The only way to manage this problem is to massively oversupply the capacity by having another motorway into the city, so you don't have all your eggs in one basket when an accident occurs.”

The second harbour crossing is a New Zealand Transport Agency project currently under investigation. Any crossing is set to cost around $4 billion and is estimated to take 10 years to plan and another five to seven to build.

The business case investigations are set to be completed later this year.

Tookey said Auckland’s interconnected roading network meant one accident could cascade in its impact, leading to congestion across the region.

“In this instance 80 per cent of the flow capacity of the main motorway from the north into the city was cut. Then the speed of traffic past the crash scene was necessarily reduced too,” he said.

Transport commentator Matt Lowrie, who writes the blog Greater Auckland, said Auckland’s transport system had little resilience and residents were too car-dependent.

“So the impacts of an event like today can quickly spread throughout the network as drivers try to find alternatives,” he said.

AUT University engineer John Tookey says a second harbour crossing would prevent a single accident causing massive delays.

“It's worth noting that another road-based harbour crossing would not have helped as the traffic would have backed up blocking access to it to.”

Lowrie said focusing on improving public transport could help lesson the impact of these incidents.

“A dedicated public transport crossing would have meant the busway or light rail would have remained unaffected,” he said.

“This wouldn't have lessened the congestion but fewer people would have been impacted - also in part because it would help encourage more people to use public transport.”