After the opening of several new highways around the North Island, we took a drive to investigate the impact on small town communities.
It’s been five months since the latest four-lane motorway was grafted into the landscape through northern Wellington and Kāpiti. The Ōtaki to Peka Peka expressway was opened in December, following the completion of Transmission Gully in March 2022. Together with the Mackays to Peka Peka expressway which opened in 2017, these routes form a chain of new roads that have diverted 58km of SH1, improving travel around the region having moved traffic away from Ōtaki, Waikanae, Paraparaumu and Paekākāriki. But the flipside of reduced noise and congestion for those towns is that potential customers have also been funnelled away from local businesses.
How has Ōtaki been affected by the new highways?
“It’s like we’ve got our town back,” says Ōtaki resident Katherine Goodwin.
It’s 9am on a Friday and a few cars trickle down the now quiet main road that used to be SH1.
The 13km Peka Peka to Ōtaki section of the Kāpiti Expressway opened just before Christmas and Katherine says the traffic that once made the town the major chokepoint nearly disappeared overnight.
“With everyone coming through, it used to clog up fast. Now more locals are coming into town because you can get a park and you don’t have to wait five, ten minutes just to cross the street.”
Mike Lawton, the owner of McAndrews Menswear, says it’s locals and out-of-towners alike who are enjoying the quieter streets.
“We’ve seen more customers coming in from Wellington.
Mike Lawton, owner of McAndrews Menswear in Ōtaki. Photo by Matthew Tso.
“There aren’t any big logging trucks like there were before, and you can actually get a park; it’s a better shopping experience – it’s easy in, easy out.”
Easy is right. The journey to Ōtaki that used to take an hour and a quarter has, on the morning we visited, been cut to little more than 45 minutes from Lower Hutt.
Mike says the new roads have reduced travel times significantly along the coast.
“I can shut the doors (at 5pm) and be in Wellington for dinner by 6pm.”
He says re-routing SH1 caused some consternation among the business community, and he knows a few people who shut up shop or shifted before the expressway opened believing the town would become unviable.
Mike’s not going anywhere, though. He’s just put in new signage.
Waikanae has become safer without so much traffic.
Waikanae local and retail worker Heather Joyes says like Ōtaki her town has enjoyed less traffic but, to her, the big changes have been in safety and resilience.
Opened in 2017 the Mackays to Peka Peka section links Peka Peka with Ōtaki to the north and Transmission Gully to the south. The expressway is wider than the old road, and Heather says the fact it doesn’t undulate and twist has meant there have been fewer accidents in the area.
Waikanae local and retail worker Heather Joyes. Photo by Matthew Tso.
She’s right. AA research has shown in the four years before the new road opened there were two deaths and 11 serious injuries on the old stretch of highway. In the four years after the expressway opened, crashes resulted in five serious injuries, but no fatalities, across both old and new routes.
Heather says the opening of the second road has meant crashes – even minor ones – no longer bring the coast to a standstill. She recalls once waiting in her car for eight hours because of a fatal crash further up the road.
“It’s been a godsend. Serious crashes happen around here semi-regularly and the alternative route does give you peace of mind.”
Kāpiti’s mayor Janet Holborow says the new expressways in conjunction with campaigns to promote the bypassed towns have been a success. Along with more visitor spending and internet searches of the region, improved safety, resilience and efficiency have made the roads a major asset.
The roads have already proven their worth, with Transmission Gully saving the day when a slip severed the newly redesignated SH59 (the former SH1) at Pukerua Bay last August. The road was closed for weeks and had there been no alternative route, traffic would have had to get in and out of Wellington via SH2 through Wairarapa – a detour of up to 300km.
Paekākāriki businesses have been impacted by Transmission Gully.
Before opening in 2022 Transmission Gully was possibly the most highly anticipated road in New Zealand’s history, with some sources claiming it was first mooted as far back as 1919. The 27km road, with an estimated price tag of $1.25 billion, cuts inland and away from SH1’s old route through Porirua’s northern suburbs and Paekākāriki, the southernmost outpost of the Kāpiti region.
A resident of Paekākāriki, Janet is aware some businesses in the village have not seen the same success as other parts of the coast.
Nicole Duke, owner of The Perching Parrot Café in Paekākāriki. Photo by Matthew Tso.
Business owners like Nicole Duke says a spike in trading at her Perching Parrot Café came and went after the Gully road opened.
“When Transmission Gully first opened the whole coast was really busy – everyone noticed business lift, but at the end of the first holidays it dropped right off.”
While she doesn’t want to pin the downturn on Transmission Gully alone – the cost of living crisis is definitely having an impact – she says it’s noticeable that there are far fewer cars on SH59, and most drivers coming off the new road aren’t inclined to backtrack for a coffee.
Two doors down at the Paekākāriki Village Grocery Store manager Bhavesh Morar offered that the cooler months were usually much quieter, but he couldn’t say if business was any better or worse since Transmission Gully opened.
What he had noticed was the village was much busier on weekends since the expressway went in.
“There’s a lot less traffic on the [old] road but in the village there’s way more traffic – people park in the middle of the street.”
“It’s a pain in the butt,” a customer chips in before she disappears out the door with her groceries.
Janet said the Kāpiti Coast District Council was working with business owners in Paekākāriki to promote the town as a destination, and further upgrades to the village and surrounding infrastructure could soon help bring in more visitors.
Paekākāriki local, Prue Tosswill. Photo by Matthew Tso.
Bhavesh, Nicole and the mayor all agree the old road is now much safer, as does local Prue Tosswill. Near misses and serious accidents were a common occurrence at the intersection where people had to merge with or cross traffic moving at 100km/h from a standing start.
“You used to hear the siren going off down at the fire station all the time – that doesn’t happen so often now.”
How has the Waikato Expressway impacted small towns?
A decade ago another bypass journey was started up the country with the Waikato Expressway divorcing SH1 from towns like Cambridge and Ngāruawāhia.
Locals say Cambridge has thrived since the bypass opened in December 2015.
Cambridge Business Chamber president Kelly Bouzaid says local shop-owners were initially concerned about through-traffic being diverted from the town’s main street, but those fears have since been allayed.
“The bypass has diverted heavy vehicles away from the town centre which creates a safer pedestrian and cycling experience and better urban mobility.”
Hamish Wright owns Paper Plus Cambridge which has sold books and stationery in the town for over 30 years. He says SH1 used to divide the town in half “like the Berlin Wall”.
Like in Ōtaki, he says the lack of heavy traffic has turned the town from a bottleneck into a destination.
“It’s been a positive thing; the locals are back and people [from out of town] are coming to explore Cambridge.”
Jutta Mark owns Alys Antiques on Victoria St, just out of Cambridge’s main shopping strip. She says the opening of the expressway hasn’t affected her business for better or worse, noting that “antiques are not the flavour of the month”.
Having lived in Cambridge since 1986, Jutta says the town is “madly busy” because it is a “comfortable halfway point” for a rest and refreshment for travellers heading to Taupō or Tauranga from Auckland.
Road safety has improved in Ngāruawāhia.
St Paul’s Catholic School is on Great South Road, a former section of SH1 that runs through Ngāruawāhia. The town was bypassed a few years before Cambridge and principal Shaun Emms says the road is much safer for pupils to cross because there is less traffic.
“Cars and trucks – they used to come thick and fast. We had to be on alert a lot of the time.”
Waikato District Councillor and former Ngāruawāhia café owner Eugene Patterson said talk of the bypass began in the 1980s and shops back then voiced fears about the impact on business.
Three decades later as the road was coming to fruition, the same concerns surfaced but Patterson says many businesses soon realised most of their customers weren’t people passing though.
“The bakeries and cafes felt an initial effect, but they pretty quickly discovered that about 90% of their trade was local.”
Ngāruawāhia had a population of 5,300 when the expressway opened in 2013, which has since grown to 8,100. Patterson thinks taking the traffic out of Ngāruawāhia has assisted in the growth of the town, as the expanding population has not had to mingle with highway traffic down the main road.
“Overall, it’s been a real positive. It became much easier for locals to get onto Great South Road.”
Built more than a decade ago, the Waikato Expressway’s Ngāruawāhia section has had pavement failure problems since opening and ongoing repairs mean traffic is occasionally redirected back into town. The slow queues and the chugging of heavy diesel trucks snaps locals’ memories back to a not-so-distant past.
“It’s a little reminder of what things used to be like,” Eugene says.
Story and photos by Matthew Tso for the Winter 2023 issue of AA Directions magazine.
What do you think? Do you live somewhere that has been impacted by a new highway? Share your thoughts.
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