Subscribe to RSSClark St Railbridge Approved
New Lynn’s Clark St rail overbridge work has been given the go ahead at the last ever Waitakere city council meeting.
The meeting voted to award Dempsey Wood Civil Contractors the $20m tender to complete stages 2 and 3 of the work around the new New Lynn transport hub area, which officially opened a week ago.
This work involves the construction of Clark Street extension and Totara Avenue west / Todd Triangle. These works will permit through traffic to bypass the New Lynn Town Centre by means of the Clark Street extension, which includes a new low level bridge over the rail lines.
NEW LYNN OPENING; Governor-General, Waitakere Mayor, Transport Minister
The Stage 2 and 3 works also include new streetscapes, a shared space road environment in Totara Avenue, landscaping and upgrading of parks.
Council impression of Clark St extension
The work is divided into three separable portions. Separable portion 1 comprises the Clark Street extension bridge, southern embankment works, an access lane to the Cambridge Clothing factory and the landscaping of Gardner Reserve.
Portion 2 comprises the construction of a shared space road in Totara Avenue, with streetscape elements and planting. The final consists of the balance of the project, being the northern part of the Clark Street extension and the road intersection works with Great North Road, New Lynn.
Council impression of Totara Ave West and Todd Triangle
The proposed works comprise utility services diversions, road works, a road-over-rail bridge, embankments, retaining walls, park upgrades, a shared space street environment, street furniture, lighting and low impact design storm water treatment works.
Work starting on Clark St
There were five companies that put in bids. The winning tenderer has been involved in work on the just completed first stage.
6 Comments
Hey a map would good for this… I’ve just been there, lovely station, well done Architectus, but what a road-fest! Can’t believe anyone feels the need for more. I seriously hope there are plans to nix at least McCrae way and that daft car park in the middle of the shops behind the library…. cars are crossing pavements everywhere. Certainly a case of machines first, humans a very clear second. Traffic engineers all over this one…. To quote Flight of The Conchords ‘The Humans Are Dead’.
There’s a map on the CBT forum, basically this whole thing is just a big roads fest…
Not only is it an inglorious roads fest but I noticed today they were installing yet another traffic light between the shopping mall and the library, presumably to replace the existing zebra crossing and, presumably,to improve vehicle access to the ‘daft car park’. It’s quite bizarre really, given the relatively low level of traffic passing through the area around the library/bus-train station. This sudden rash of traffic lights only prompts pedestrians into ignoring signals that take up to two minutes to go through a pedestrian crossing cycle. The station is, as Patrick R observes, good architecture; the surrounding roads infrastructure is an obscenity that will only be exacerbated by the Clark Street extension.
“Traffic engineers all over this one…”
Sigh. I am a traffic engineer, and I coined the “island in a sea of roads” moniker some year or so back on the CBT forum.
Just because traffic stuff gets designed by traffic engineers doesn’t mean we should get all the blame, thanks*. How about you ask your politicians, and your developers? I get a lot of pushback when I try careful steps towards more pedestrianisation. No wonder many just don’t care and build roadsfests - why go against the flow of those who control the funding?
*Architects are worst sometimes. Decades of modernism and other crimes, of creating buildings as artworks first, and usable human spaces a distant second, and they have the gall to decry “engineer cities”, as one did during a talk last night.
Humble apologies, I guess i do lazily use the phrase ‘traffic engineer’ as shorthand for the machine prioritised ideology that dominates in this town. Will try to resist the temptation, though I have been in the odd meeting with some pretty bad car counters. Perhaps the good ones could be renamed ‘human engineers’ to make it clearer for us poor civilians. But yes, others are peddlers of the rotten faith too; came across a strange piece of writing by architect Pete Bossley whining that cars and roads don’t get enough support…. what? Completely incoherent something about the Dutch using bikes a lot so we should drive more… huh? And we’ve been very poorly served by planners for the last 60 years…. mea culpa
In my experience of where I work (and we are not a very PT or walk/cycle-focused company at all), at least 50% of the traffic engineers are very pro-alternative modes. Maybe 30% are on the fence, and a small subset is clearly pro-car. I had similar experiences with Council people. In my view, the professional people are more enlightened than the politicians and the general public, which has forgotten (or never experienced) how much better a more balanced transport environment is.