Subscribe to RSSLee: Onehunga Disgrace
ARA Chair, Mike Lee, told KiwiRail and ARTA today: “Lift your game.”
His “clear message” came with news that the Onehunga station will be finished in July but not open until September 13 while KiwiRail finish their track work and testing.
Mr Lee said it was a “disgrace” that things had moved so slowly with the Onehunga station and re-commissioning of the Onehunga line, when it had been in the planning stages for three years.
He was especially appalled that there still issues of resource consent being dealt with and that all resource consents needed for Onehunga had not been dealt with at once.
“I have been mislead for months about progress and this is unacceptable,” he told today’s ARC transport and uirban development committee.
“It will be many many months before we get services on the line and we will have a station with nothing happening.”
He called it a “poor performance all around.”
Former ITM site has been cleared for the new Onehunga station
In a verbal report to the meeting, an ARTA representative gave a timeline of issues being resolved.
- Last September worked started on Penrose, Te Papapa stations
- In March, the ARC got approval for locating the Onehunga station and “we are about to embark on building the station on the former ITM site”
- In April, the Auckland City Council gave the necessary approval for the minor modification to the rail corridor at Onehunga
- Still awaited are resource consent for pedestrian access (expected in a few weeks) and ARC approval of environmental resource consent for contaminated land (verbally said to be coming through)
- Construction of the station at Onehunga starts late May and carries through to July
- Nearby residents will be invited to briefings through that period
- The remaining issue is design and funding for a Park and Ride which would be constructed late August or early September
- “Furniture” for the Te Papapa and Penrose platforms will be placed in June
He said the Onehunga construction involved:
- A new track formation from Galway St crossing to a new buffer stop
- 55m long two-car platform with the new rail designation
- Two station commuter access points - at Princes St and Onehunga Mall
- CCTV and lighting, not just for the station but the close by residents in the apartment block
- The possibility of a train information arrival board in Dressmart sometime in the “future “
2 Comments
The works took forever to start, there was a flurry of activity, then nothing, now apparently resource issues, deadline after deadline missed… Someone deserves to be canned over this…
love the whole “signage in dressmart, sometime in the future” once again, a stuff up, this should be in there well before the trains comes to test it, and to make people aware of “hay, did you know from such and such a date, you can know catch the trains, and btw you can also get information here in the shopping centre….” the signs should be put up and they should also setup a ticket kiosk… would rude not to. maybe even if its for only 6 months, because hay, not everybody in Auckland knows how the trains work, they did it here in Perth when the opened up the new line 3 years back, they had people everywhere helping people to get on it.