NEW STANDARD

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 3, 4 July 1939, Page 10

NEW STANDARD

DESIGN OF HUTT ROAD

TRIANGLE AT NGAHAURANGA

BASE AND SURFACING

With the main reconstruction well towards Petone, detailed work—the! laying of twin kerbs along the centre j line to divide the in-and-out traffic j lines, the erection of crash fencing oni the curving bankings, and the turfing of roadside slopes, is beginning at the Ngahauranga end of. the Hutt Road. The road will reach a new standard for the Dominion, not merely in traffic safety, but, if the foundations for beautification are used, in attractive finish as well. The possibilities in this direction have been mentioned by members of the Beautifying Society and of the Horticultural Society in regard to the central strip, and a further scope opens in the treatment of the sea side of the roadway, where there will be space for beds, eight or nine feet wide,- between the road and the cycle track. Whatever criticism is levelled against mud and slush, drivers agree that, considering the difficulties of construction in winter months, extraordinary progress is being made and a remarkably good surface is held. Cars, buses, and lorries are busy every day knocking the new formation to pieces, and rollers, graders, and road planers follow along and get it back again. Actually the surface pounding and the grading, and regrading, and regrading,' are all in the plan of road formation; the cars, buses, and lorries are doing a good job of road-building themselves. NEW PLAN OF CONSTRUCTION. Three Or four years ago the standard highway practice was to compact the foundation as nearly as possible, to spread four to six inches of hard, broken metal, or river gravel where the right grades were obtainable, and to roll and crush the metal to fill the voids and obtain a mechanical locking; but there is no hard-metal in the new Hutt Road, for the standards of a few years ago have been far departed from. Instead, the broken rock, by rolling, grading, and traffic kneading, is relaid so compactly that it closely approaches the denseness and solidity of natural rock. Standard concrete weighs 165 pounds to the cubic foot, and greywacke rock has been worked down under the highway plan now adopted to as dense a mass as 155 pounds to the cubic foot, actually more dense (as regards', minute voids) than concrete. The system has been developed by the Main Highways Board and has been, taken up in Australia, and has aroused a great deal of interest among road engineers in America and elsewhere. TWO YEARS TO SUPPLY CRUSHED METAL. It is obviously more economical than the former standard construction if the materials on the spot are suitable, and the system has a particular application to the three big highway works near Wellington—the Gorge Road, the Plimmerton-Paekakariki highway, and the Hutt Road—in that the construction of these highways simultaneously under the old method would have been an impossibility, as there simply are not enough sources of crushed metal in the Wellington Province to have supplied the stone needed for fiftyfoot highways in less than two years, and these three roads are to be fully open to traffic before the end of this year. . As it is. the Main Highways Board is going as far as Wanganui to obtain the supply of chips and hard metal for the finishing of the running surfaces. The treatment so far put down on the Hutt Road is not the running surface; it is simply a priming treatment to give the later treatments a surface to grip. It is laid under considerable weather difficulties, for normally the priming coat would be deferred until the surface was dry, but traffic demands and the necessity for completion of the first running coat before November set a hard time-table. It is not expected that this-light priming coat will stand up to traffic without repair, but it will end the mud, and will, be followed up, as _oon as the weather is right, by the first running surface, and later again—possibly not for a year or more—by a final running surface of one or other of the bituminous surfaces. JUNCTION WITH GORGE ROAD. The road lay-out at the junction with Ngahauranga Gorge is a job in itself. The present road will remain much as it is, for ti Sic running down the gorge towards Wellington or turning north towards the Hutt Valley. The stream will be culverted, two houses and the butcher's shop will be shifted, and a long, triangular island, with its base to the Hutt Road, will stretch back up the Gorge Road, with another roadway, for traffic running towards the gorge, on its southern side; up and down traffic will thus be clearly divided, Three islands will also be set out on the Hutt Road at this point, so placed that traffic lines will be definitely separated and of sufficient width to allow cars to wait between them, out of the run of traffic, until a gap in one or other line of vehicles leaves the way clear. What is not realised, for Wellington has accepted the steady growth of traffic as normal enough, is that the Hutt Road-Ngahauranga Gorge junction will carry more traffic than many town intersections where; under overseas standards, full control, by pointsmen or lights,,is considered necessary. The outer Hutt Road is carrying 8000 vehicles *in a ten-hour day and the inner, length over 10,000 vehicles. Sooner or later a light control wili have to come at this junction, but it is not proposed in the meantime. Crash fences will be erected on the higher sides, of bankings. These will be built of heavy woven-mesh netting backed by two three-quarter-inch cables stretched between hardwood posts. Nothing will stop the suicide driver, short of natural rock or a railway pier, but the fences will give a solid degree of protection. STOPPING PLACES AND CYCLE TRACK. Parking space will be set aside over practically the full length of the road on the seaward side and at intervals on the hill side, for cars stopping on a two-lane way would reduce it to onelane effectiveness. The cycle track is twenty feet wide, and the proposal is to reduce it to twelve feet, any amount for the cycles it will carry, and to gain a foot or two outside the kerb. These parks will be set out between each second or third pair of telegraph posts and the intermediate spaces can be developed as- shrubberies or flower beds, and what not. Someone will surely suggest that here are more sites for more hoardings—perhaps even hoarding seats.

The cycle track, the subject of re-

quests for and promises from tlie City and Suburban Highways Board,.of repair and maintenance for fifteen years past,, is to be made a cycle track, narrower, certainly, by eight feet, but with a surface that cyclists can ride, on with decent comfort, . *. :