Auckland Harbour Bridge cycleway will extend to Albany, cost $300m more

Wednesday, 12 February 2020

The cross-harbour cycle and walkway and 3.4km connecting network will be called Northern Pathway. (First published in August 2020)

A planned $360 million cycleway over Auckland's Harbour Bridge will now extend as far north as Albany instead of terminating in Northcote.

It is one of a raft of design changes to the project formerly known as 'Skypath' announced by the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) on Wednesday.

The main path will now run continuously into what had previously been designed as a separate cycleway along the northern motorway, called Seapath.

An artist's impression of the walking and cycling add-on to the eastern side of Auckland's Harbour Bridge.

Future stages will go north to Albany and west along Constellation Drive, as well as connecting into local cycle lanes on the North Shore.

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NZTA bought the 'Skypath' project from a charitable trust in 2019. Construction on the cycle and walkway will begin next year.

The original concept was for a carbon fibre 'tube' attached to the harbour bridge steelwork, but NZTA has now designed a steel structure that will be supported by the existing concrete foundations.

Andy Thackwray, NZTA's senior manager of project delivery, said a new name was also needed that embraced the future stages of the cycleway up to Albany.

'[Skypath is] synonymous with a particular design, that's the danger with it, that the name is associated with a specific design that is not the design that we are going to deliver,' he said.

It is now on its second working name – the Northern Pathway – at NZTA after previously being called the Auckland Harbour Shared Path and SeaPath.

The government in January confirmed $360 million of funding for the Northern Pathway and that work, in addition to the Harbour Bridge, would start in 2021.

The missing link in the wider project is the section between Akoranga and Constellation Drives, which still has to go through assessment of a business case.

The northern cycleway section from Constellation Drive to Albany is being built now as part of highway upgrades.

NZTA hopes the harbour bridge add-on and the cycleway through to Akoranga Drive will be complete by 2024.

While the previous Skypath project had been described as costing $67 million, Thackwray said it had never been properly costed.

The higher budget reflected both detailed, costed design work and the greater scale of the project.