Eastern Transport Corridor

The Eastern Transport Corridor in Auckland, New Zealand, is a transport reserve along a strip of land and water some of which is occupied by housing, commerce, industry and local roads. It runs adjacent to the North Island Main Trunk railway freight and passenger railway line, but is earmarked for major transport intensification to improve links from central Auckland to eastern suburbs such as Pakuranga and Howick.

Historically, it was to provide the route for an additional motorway connecting through the Isthmus from the east into the Auckland CBD, with an estimated cost of up to $4 billion, but political and local community resistance made the project fail in the 2000s. The NZ Transport Agency designations remain in place as of 2010.

A strategy study in 2002 stated a need for a new motorway to be built in the corridor (as had been planned decades ago) 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 massive motorway scheme through Hobson Bay. There was 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, as well as areas like Tamaki Drive, the Parnell Baths and several environmentally sensitive areas. However, there were also groups that defended it, citing the projected economic gains, and the benefit it would have on the traffic volumes on Tamaki Drive. John Banks proposed to underground large sections of the scheme (earning it the nickname 'tunnelway' amongst some commentators) and proposed to pay for the construction costs at least partly by selling Auckland City's 25% shareholding in Auckland International Airport, and by charging a $5 toll.

In 2002, it was also proposed by John Banks that the Eastern Transport Corridor might link into a harbour tunnel starting north of Parnell, and linking to Ngataringa Bay near Devonport, for an estimated cost of $1 billion.

Many spoke out against the project, including figures such as the former Auckland City Mayor Christine Fletcher, who argued out that the proposed motorway barely featured in the statutory policy documents, that Councillors lacked needed information to make informed decisions about it, and that the intended growth areas of the city would not require the corridor, with a public transport route being preferable.

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