Members backed Auckland Transport’s safety case, while those against said the money buys too little
The Howick Local Board has voted 8 to 3 to back new traffic signals at the Hutchinson Road, Aberfeldy Avenue and Pakuranga Road intersection, four months after Pakuranga MP Simeon Brown began campaigning against them.
“Another crazy idea from Auckland Transport,” Brown wrote in a Facebook post ahead of a public meeting, alongside a video filmed at the intersection.
“They want to put yet another set of traffic lights on Pakuranga Road, just a few hundred metres from the existing lights at Bucklands Beach Road.”
“It appears all Auckland Transport wants on Pakuranga Road is more traffic lights, more congestion and to slow traffic down.”
Brown fronted that meeting with the agency on 23 May.
Three months later at the Board table, chair Bruce Kendall said the sentiment in the room at that meeting was “firmly against this”.
He voted for the signals anyway.
Auckland Transport wants to signalise the intersection and add pedestrian crossings on all three roads, with cycle ramps, wider footpaths and relocated bus stops.
It says there is no safe place to cross Pakuranga Road there now, and no protection for cyclists.
“Turning right from Pakuranga Road into Aberfeldy is terrifying at times,” Kendall said.
Late letters of support from Howick Primary and Pakuranga College “took me over the line”, he said.
Board member Damian Light said they decided it for him too.
Board member John Spiller also voted for it, while calling himself “a bit conflicted” on whether motorists gain.
Auckland Transport expects the lights to prevent about one death or serious injury a year, at a modelled cost of up to 30 seconds’ delay.
Board members Mike Turinsky, Adele White and Luke Collings voted against.
Turinsky said the scheme was well designed but would not fix what it was meant to fix.
Traffic from Botany Road and Ridge Road had not been modelled, he said.
“I’m not convinced this will solve the problem and I’m not convinced that the spend is put in the right place,” he said.
White said she had understood the work was for a safe right turn out of Hutchinson Road, which the design does not provide.
“You’re not actually going to be doing a heck of a lot more than you can actually do now,” she said.
Senior transportation engineer Chatura Siriwardane said the right turn was left out because of the delay it would add on Pakuranga Road.
He called it “a compromise we made”.
The intersection recorded 14 crashes between 2020 and 2024, four of them serious.
NZTA counts its 2020 and 2021 records as incomplete.
Most involved pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists, or vehicles turning in or out.
Surveyors watched almost 60 people cross the five-lane road near the bus stops in four hours rather than use the crossing.
Ten were unaccompanied children.
Of 654 submissions, 333 raised only concerns.
Another 190 were supportive with concerns, and 131 supportive outright.
Detailed design will be finalised in the coming months and construction scheduled for the 2026/27 financial year.
