Eastern Transport Corridor
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The Eastern Transport Corridor in Auckland, New Zealand, is transport reserve along a strip of land and water that is currently occupied largely by housing, commerce, industry and local roads. It runs directly adjacent to an exisiting underutilised freight and passsenger railway line, but is earmarked for major transport intensification (in the form of a limited access arterial road or motorway) 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 however 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 Mayor 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 John 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 purchace a small number of the most affected properties along the route. Due to the current massive shortfall of funding for transport in New Zealand (and Auckland in particular), the roading component of the ETC would not ever be likely to proceed without some form of tolling or road pricing or a massive re-organisation of national transport funding priorities.