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The long-awaited sealing of Takatu Road is finally nearing completion, after 21 months, several delays and a final cost of $5.3 million – around $1.3 million more than originally estimated.
Auckland Transport (AT) said the final 1.5km of metalled road was due to be sealed on Wednesday, December 13 – weather permitting – with road marking to be carried out and completed in the following few days.
The project to seal a 4.5km section of the only road out to Tawharanui Regional Park was started in March last year and it was originally hoped it could be finished by June this year.
However, delays at the design and peer review stages, plus the sealing of Te Hana’s Silverhill Road taking longer than expected, combined to force the final construction phase into the winter months, which included an exceptionally wet September.
AT’s media relations manager Mark Hannan said the original $4 million estimate was based on the per kilometre cost of a straightforward basic road sealing project. However, the location and terrain of the final Takatu Road section, combined with the need to bring the road up to required engineering and road safety standards, meant it had been far from a case of simply putting seal on an existing road.
“With this project, we took the opportunity to upgrade the road, including road width, horizontal and vertical realignment, and a new drainage system,” he said.
Generally, AT puts the basic cost of sealing an unsealed road around $450,000 per km, but that figure ranged from $1.28 million to $1.33 million per km at Takatu Road, as it also did for the recently sealed section of Matakana Valley Road.
In June 2015, the last period for which AT could provided data, there were 187 vehicles per day using Takatu Road during the week and 302 on a Sunday, a figure that rises dramatically during the peak summer holiday season.
