What better use of a long weekend take my girlfriend to Wenderholm Regional Park? And what better way to get there than the new(ish) long-awaited Northern Gateway Toll Road? 4 lanes of brand-new seal followed by a tunnel cutting its way through a inconvenient ridge, a bargain at only $2 per trip.
The Northern Gateway Toll Road has some excellent points. First is the method of payment. There are no toll-booths; your number plate is snapped as you cruise along. You can pay online in advance (as I did) or up to 3 days later. Frequent travelers can set up an account, disorganized people can purchase tickets at vending machines at the side of the road, and people who don’t pay get threatening letters then presumably kneecapped. The road caters for everyone.
The road bypasses a picturesque by otherwise annoying stretch of SH1, completely missing Orewa and Waiwera and the nasty twisty hills surrounding them that seemed to be purposely designed as the worlds largest speed bumps.
In theory, having 2 lanes each way should make the trip north much quicker but there is a fatal flaw – the tunnel at the northern end has only one northbound lane! This means that when the road gets busy (which it will every weekend over summer), the 2 lanes merging will cause as massive traffic jam. We were caught in just such a jam on Friday, crawling along at 10km/h for about half the length of the new road, not quite the user-experience we were promised. Worst of all, for much of the journey we could see across the valley to the old road, along which traffic was merrily zipping along.
The good news is that the northbound tunnel has space for another lane – my guess is that in a few years they will improved the approach to the single lane SH1 enough to allow both lanes of traffic trough the tunnel at the same time.
There is one other problem with the Northern Gateway Toll Road – it doesn’t actually lead to Wenderholm Regional Park. I was aware of this before we left, but I thought the time saved would make up for having to backtrack slightly. This caused much mocking from the girlfriend as we drove south along the totally empty former main road, mocking I could have gotten at home without spending $2.
Wenderholm was very nice though.
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