Monorail offered for central Auckland

Press, 4 December 1987, Page 34

Monorail offered for central Auckland

PA Auckland Sleek monorail trains will snake their way over the harbour bridge and through central Auckland on overhead girders if the Auckland Regional Authority takes up a monorail company’s suggested plan. But such a scheme invited protest by those opposed to big girders running alongside veranda tops in the central city. An Auckland monorail feasibility study by the Swiss-Australian firm Von Roll Habegger was presented to the Auckland Regional Authority’s urban transport committee. The firm was completing a monorail system in Sydney linking the central city with the huge new Darling Harbour develop-

ment. It proposed almost identical trains and girders for Auckland.

The Auckland proposal was for two monorail routes: A line across the harbour bridge along the edges of the clip-on lanes and an inner-city loop line running along Hobson Street, Quay Street on the waterfront, and Queen Street, with stations along the way. The whole system was estimated to cost about $B3 million. The A.R.A. urban transport committee’s chairman, Mr Brian Berg, said the study’s design and costings were attractive and the proposal would be considered by the authority with other options to

solve transport problems. Von Roll’s managing director in Sydney, Mr John Sturgess, said the monorail system could be running by 1991 if the A.R.A. decided to go ahead by next year.

The Sydney monorail system was due to be completed by April but it had drawn much criticism from the public and Sydney City Council.

The main objections had been the unsightliness of the girders running past inner-city buildings, the fast-tracking of the project by the New South Wales Government through the use of special legislation and delays and cost over-runs.