It has finally been publicly confirmed – there will be an underpass for the Northwestern Cycleway crossing the much enlarged Te Atatu Interchange on the west-east route.
I haven’t got much detail yet, but it was confirmed to the public last Wednesday at a meeting of the SH16 Causeway community liaison group, so is now well and truly “arrived”, where before it was only a “maybe”, and then a “likely”.
With my long personal driving of this issue, I though this was worth a short post, even though I had just announced stepping down from my blog-editing here – it ticks all the loophole boxes I allowed myself [Also many thanks to Bryce Pearce, who managed to attend the public meeting for us].
I consider this one of the biggest wins on the infrastructure front since the $8 million Waterview Cycleway itself. Importantly, it means that we are increasingly getting closer to the European concept that a major cycleway deserves grade separation, for both safety and convenience, at a major interruption like a motorway interchange.
CAA was to my memory the only group who even asked for this during the Board of Inquiry process – pointing out to the Court that a crossing of around four different signal stages, as originally proposed in the NZTA plans, would risk of making the cycleway much less attractive, by costing users many minutes delay each way.
More detail will come as soon as the minutes / presentations from last night are made public [Update: Seems there wasn’t really any extra information in the presentation beyond the bare fact that the underpass itself is in – but at least it was quite clear that they weren’t referring to the north-south underpass]. We are confident that with the high design standards being used on the SH16 works (such as on this underpass), the result will be user-friendly, and a far cry from the dingy & scary designs one has sometimes seen in the past.
