Christchurch Northern Corridor

This project combines the Transport Agency’s Northern Arterial (a new section of SH74 running from just south of the Waimakariri River to QEII Drive near Winters Rd) and two Christchurch City Council projects that link QEII Drive to Cranford St and four-lane Cranford St to Innes Rd. With an estimated project cost of $240 million.

The Northern Corridor comes with a number of proposed benefits for the city of Christchurch.

Stated Benefits of the Northern Corridor

• Improved travel times shorten travel times in and out of Christchurch and improve reliability via all main routes.
• Improved access all modes including freight will move more efficiently in and out of Christchurch and Lyttelton Port.
• Safer streets moving heavy traffic off suburban roads making them safer and encouraging walking, cycling and the use of public transport.
• The new motorway will be built to higher safety standards.
• Economic growth enables sustainable residential development in the north of Christchurch and support commercial and industrial development throughout Canterbury.
• It brings additional shared tracks linking up with existing tracks, including allowance for cycling across the Waimakariri Motorway Bridge with a clip-on cycle path.

Negatives Being Raised

• Safety in the suburbs during construction period, as the roads taking the Northern Corridor traffic start to be upgraded.
• Ability of Cranford Street to take the volume of traffic coming off the corridor. An example being is Brougham Street a dual two lane road with traffic lights that has a motorway feeding onto it from the south which causes long delays during busy periods.
• In the late 1980’s the plan had the Northern Corridor finishing at Bealey Avenue, however it now finishes on Cranford Street at Innes Road “this means the construction falls under the local Council to manage.
• Plans to stop gridlocked traffic on Cranford Street from using smaller suburban streets to get out of the congestion in a lot of cases won’t happen for some time after the corridor is completed.
• When major roading splits communities it tends to stop people from navigating these roads to support local business.
• Focus of the project is on moving cars not essential freight or forms of mass transport.

Whether you agree or disagree with the project one thing that is hard to debate is that since the 1960s, there have been plans to run a motorway from the north into the heart of the city of Christchurch.
With Cranford St earmarked as a possibility to carry a large portion of the cars along the last leg of this journey. 
Every now and again residents living in the areas impacted on, raise their concerns fighting the changes and at times they appeared to have perhaps won their fight.

However now fifty years later the Northern Corridor completion has become a reality. It almost seems that over the period of five decades nothing has been done to problem solve effectively to illuminate what appears to be the original concerns of the project.

This is likely to have something to do with it being a political hot potato for local politicians.