Relief in sight with completion near

CONNECTED: Closing the gaps from piers three to five resulted in a 300-metre continuous deck on the now nearly complete new Mangere Bridge.

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Motorists could be driving across the new Manukau harbour bridge on State Highway 20 as early as July with news the project will now finish seven months ahead of schedule.

The Manukau Harbour Crossing Alliance says the $230 million project due to finish in March 2011 for the Rugby World Cup will now be complete and open in August.

That’s even better than the year-end finish predicted by the New Zealand Transport Agency early last month.

Alliance project manager Andrew Rose says two of the new bridge’s four lanes will open to southbound traffic in July.

"Then progressively the other lanes will open up."

And drivers can expect even earlier relief from rush-hour congestion on the southwestern motorway.

Mr Rose says the motorway on each side of the crossing will be widened from two to three lanes by May or June.

"That will make a huge difference to the bottlenecks south of the bridge – it will remove them."

Transport Minister Steven Joyce says the early opening for the new bridge is great news for Auckland and the entire country.

The new crossing will cut up to 20 minutes from the journey between the airport and central Auckland, he says.

"Reducing congestion on this part of State Highway 20 will bring real gains for our exporters who depend on travel reliability to get to the airport and for the thousands of visitors to New Zealand who also rely on it."

Mr Joyce says the early finish is a tribute to the hard work on site and teamwork between the agency and its partners Fletchers, Beca and Higgins.

The new crossing will double the capacity on the southwestern motorway between Onehunga and Mangere.

It includes four lanes of traffic and a bus shoulder lane southbound on the new bridge, the same number of northbound lanes on the existing bridge, and provision for rail.

The crossing is part of the 48km western ring route between Manukau and Albany via State Highways 20, 16 and 18.

• The project started this year with top scores from the Auckland Regional Council in its weekly inspections for environmental compliance.

Auckland and Northland State Highways manager Tommy Parker says so far 95 percent of the project’s compliance scores have been one’s or two’s, far in excess of the Auckland Regional Council’s best practice measure of 80 percent.

- © Fairfax NZ News