Joyce vows work on expressway to start

All five sections of the Waikato Expressway will be under way within five years, Transport Minister Steven Joyce promised yesterday.

Work on the Rangiriri, Ngaruawahia and Taupiri sections of the expressway will begin next year and by 2015 the Huntly and Hamilton sections will be ready for construction.

Mr Joyce, in Hamilton yesterday, reconfirmed the Government's commitment to completing the Waikato Expressway within 10 years and announced a $168.7 million funding package to construct the 7.2 kilometre section of the Te Rapa bypass.

However, he acknowledged the schedule as it stood today was not the 10-year timeframe originally promised and it would be "the challenge and the goal" to meet this.

The regional transport committee was told in February that the Hamilton section of the bypass was not due to be completed until 2024-25 and work would not begin until 2018-19.

The Rangiriri section of the expressway is expected to be completed first, by the end of 2013.

The Huntly or Hamilton sections will be the last to be completed, but Mr Joyce would not be drawn on the order of completion.

"As long as we get the whole thing built I'm a happy man. I don't have a preference particularly, my preference is getting the whole thing built."

Mr Joyce said the order would be determined by the engineers and would come down to sequence and planning.

He said work on the expressway had been stalled for too long and its completion would deliver significant benefits to the region for commuters, businesses, freight companies and importers and exporters.

Work on the Te Rapa bypass was $10 million below budget and 12 months ahead of schedule, he said. The Te Rapa bypass will feed into the Ngaruawahia section of the Waikato Expressway, which will in turn connect to the Hamilton section.

Hamilton City Council transport committee chair Dave MacPherson, however, said his understanding was that the Hamilton and Huntly sections would be started and finished together.

"Our fear was there would be this nice new expressway to the north that gorges traffic into Hamilton and there would be nothing to push traffic through the city." He estimated it would push between 20,000 and 30,000 vehicles heading for other destinations through the city each day.

"We don't mind if they are done at the same time, but we mind very strongly if it's Huntly before Hamilton," Mr MacPherson said.

Waikato District Mayor Peter Harris, who has been a strong supporter of the expressway, said the Waikato needed the expressway more than anything else.

"The Waikato Expressway is critical to the economic health of this region and, therefore, to the economic health of this nation."

Mr Harris said he wasn't interested in which sections were completed first, just that they were completed as soon as possible.

The Waikato Expressway will take 35 minutes off the drive from Auckland to Tirau and 85 per cent of it goes through Waikato District.

The Te Rapa bypass alone would create 250 jobs and materials would be sourced from within the greater Waikato.

Waikato Regional Transport Committee chairman Norm Barker said the Government's target of completing the expressway by 2019 and getting its economic infrastructure right was also significant from a safety perspective.

- © Fairfax NZ News