Less land needed for Opawa expressway

Press, 12 April 1979, Page 1

Less land needed for Opawa expressway

A staging plan for the 53.5 M first stage of an Opawa expressway was approved by the Christchurch City Council’s works and traffic committee yesterday. The scaled-down expressway project would mean that from 30 per cent to 45 per cent of properties originally designated for the heavy-traffic relief route could have their designations lifted. About 30 of the 100 properties between the present Opawa Road-York Street intersection and Garlands Road could have designations taken away. Parts of other designations could be released. The first stage of an Opawa expressway could take from seven to eight years to build, depending on the level of National Roads Board funding for new works over those years. At present, most new Roads Board projects were being deferred altogether, said the streetworks engineer (Mr H. E. Surtees), and so Christchurch was lucky in at

least getting $220,000 from the board this year to start property-buying.

Some councillors said they were concerned about the project’s taking up to 10 years, as heavy traffic, problems on Opawa Road were already serious. The traffic engineer (Mr M. L. Gadd) agreed that there was “a good argument for spending money fairly quickly here. The present road is sort of hanging together on a wing and a prayer” because of heavy traffic from the port and industrial areas. There were figures to show that a heavy truck did 28 times the road damage that a car did. About 15 per cent of Opawa Road’s traffic is heavy goods vehicles. That proportion is higher than for any other city street. Cr D. C. Close said he Was concerned that it would take so long to divert such traffic from the suburban street. If money were not a problem, the relief expressway could be built in perhaps

four years, engineers said. But City Council and Roads Board funding levels would have to be increased. Mr Surtees said it would be risky to “put all the eggs in one basket” by boosting future spending without knowing what the Roads Board would do. The Government would be paying for about 75 per cent of the over-all project, and it was possible, from present trends, that board spending on new works could be stopped. The Mayor of Christchurch (Mr H. G. Hay) noted that the Government was allocating big money to get the southern motors way link completed between Blenheim Road and the Brougham Street expressway. Heavy traffic along that route would be coming into the Opawa area, and the Government should be expected to provide enough money to get the job finished. Two other recommended changes have a direct bearing on the Opawa expressway. The Sydenham

section of the southern motorway will probably be deleted or indefinitely postponed. That was announced last June. The associated Waltham interchange, long designated between Brougham and Wordsworth Streets, would also be deleted, according to present planning, along with a stretch of the Opawa motorway south of Walpole Street. Those deletions would mean that Brougham Street and Opawa expressways would be expected to carry a larger amount of traffic than originally planned. Stage 1 of the Opawa expressway would start with a dual carriageway between the end of the Brougham Street extension and Ensors Road. The extension will be completed at about the middle of this year. At about the same time, Ensors Road to the north of the railway tracks would be widened to two lanes in each direction to join the widening already done south of Ferry Road.

East of Ensors Road, the expressway’s first stage woUld have only two lanes along the railway line and across a new Heathcote River bridge to Garlands Road. Eventually, it would be widened to four lanes as traffic pressures built up. The expressway will run along the line of the present Vincent Place, a quiet residential street. At present, the Ensors Road - Opawa Road intersection is busy enough to require traffic signals. But signals would be placed at the expressway intersection further north, and so a roundabout would be built in Opawa Road. One question yesterday was how much land should be bought for the two-lane section through Vincent Place. Existing houses may not be touched by that two-lane road, but they would no longer have access in front of them. Access would have to come from Opawa Road after the expressway was built. Cr Vicki Buck said that

home-owners might prefer to keep the houses intact, instead of having the land cleared for future renewal housing. That issue will remain unresolved for a while, until the council determines how much land should actually be bought at the start of a threestage expressway. The City Engineer (Mr P. G. Scoular) said that Cr Buck’s concern was one shared by council planners. “If we are not careful, this one route might become sort of ‘council flat alley’,” he said, referring to renewal housing already built along parts of the Brougham Street expressway on land taken for the roadworks. Cr Buck said there might be a way to pay compensation for loss of privacy and leave the houses there. The third stage of an Opawa expressway would travel along designated land from Garlands Road to the Heathcote County boundary.

Mr Hay asked why the future road could not continue along industrial land beside the railway, instead of taking out homes along Opawa Road. Mr Gadd said that alternative had been studied years ago and was not considered feasible. For one thing, the row of Opawa Road houses was already troubled by nearby industry, and a landscaped expressway would provide a good buffer between that activity and houses on the south side of the road. Traffic flows along Brougham Street and the completed southern motorway are expected to be about 15,000 vehicles a day, but the present 11400 vehicle-per-day load on Opawa Road could be reduced dramatically to about 3000 vehicles east of Ensors Road in the long run. The Brougham Street expressway, leading into the new project, has cost about $4.7M over a 12year construction period.