Te Atatu Motorway Interchange finished on schedule after 2 years When complete, traffic will be able to flow between Northland and Waikato, without going onto the Southern Motorway at all, by-passing the city altogether. Various on and off-ramps (including at the massive new Waterview interchange), will enable other traffic to reach different parts of Auckland by a new route. The causeway rebuild and the tunnels will be complete by the end of this year, enabling the new Western Ring Route, the biggest motorway building project in New Zealand for decades, to open early in 2017.
What's happening on Te Atatu Road? The completed Te Atatu Motorway Interchange looking east. Te Atatu South is to the right.
After two years the hugely remodelled Te Atatu Motorway interchange has been completed, bang on schedule. The massive project was scheduled to finish in early 2016 and national road-builders NZTA did the final planting and tidying up in late April, completing a project that has significantly widened and realigned the interchange and extended the associated North Western cycle way. The Te Atatu motorway over-bridge has been widened with an extra lane on both sides and raised. This gives greater clearance and safety margins underneath made necessary by the much bigger trucks and buses now using our roads that weren’t around when the motorway was first built in the 1950s. Raising the bridges carrying pedestrians and cyclists is an additional safety measure. The on and off-ramps have been widened and reconfigured to give extra capacity and safety and also to enable buses to connect with the new bus shoulder lanes that are being added to the motorway itself, between Te Atatu and Waterview. This stretch is referred to as the causeway, and it is being raised to overcome the periodic problems with flooding during king tides and to future proof the road against any rises in sea level that might occur in years to come. The rebuilt causeway, also widened, is scheduled to open later this year at much the same time as work finishes on the Waterview Tunnels and it’s “spaghetti junction”. Later stages of the North Western Motorway upgrade include the section Te Atatu to Lincoln Road (now being worked on) which is expect to be complete next year and then, Lincoln Road to Westgate the following year.
Western Ring Route opening early 2017 The project is a component in the new Western Ring Route, which involves upgrading the North Western Motorway (SH16) from Westgate to Waterview, building the new Waterview tunnels and connecting these two sections to the South Western motorway (SH20) which links to Manukau and the Airport.
A number or people have been saying that there wasn’t much happening on Te Atatu Road since before Christmas, but appearances have been deceptive. There’s been a lot of work happening but much of it has been underground, and this has posed challenges that had to be solved. With Te Atatu Road going to be widened, a strip of land has been bought from the front of many properties to enable widening. Accordingly, all the front boundaries of the affected properties had to be moved to their new location, closer to the houses. Second, all the underground services (power, water, phone) had to be moved closer to the properties so that they were still under the berms, and not under the road, once the road had been widened. This requires electrical, phone and water specialists who move the services without unscheduled outages of the services to households and with safety to themselves. However, there’s always the risk with road works, that maps of the underground services, are going to be inaccurate. The older the road, the more likely this is to be. That was the situation at Te Atatu Road. Challenges first emerged when contractors found that the very old water-main was quite fragile and needed to be replaced in one continuous operation instead of in stages as first planned. Eventually, project managers decided to do a thorough investigation before going any further. This took time but, it was worth it to get a clear picture of what was under the surface to save time in the long run. It also means that, now, contractors only need a partial lane closure. For the present a north-bound lane will be closed between the roundabout and Vera Road. Later, this section of lane will reopen and the section Vera to the motorway will be closed instead. Closing the lane gives contractors room to work in the berms safely, and for storing material and equipment. From now on, with underground challenges being overcome, residents and road users will see a lot of activity, as contractors race to get the upgraded road built in time to connect with the newly upgraded motorway causeway and Waterview tunnels.
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