You can’t live in Uptown without knowing that transport is shaping the precinct’s future. When the City Rail Link is completed it will leave a huge canvas for new ideas about housing and urban design. But there’s far more than that going on. Uptown is in the process of becoming a transport nexus – and the connections slashed half a century ago when the motorways came through are being restored.

In addition to the CRL, there’s a major upgrade of Upper Symonds Street in the works, part of an arterial project that will stretch along New North Road all the way to Avondale. Decisions around that will determine the ways people get to and around Uptown by bus, bike and car. And now there’s Auckland Light Rail, a literally groundbreaking project that will land either within or near the boundaries of Uptown. There’s a lot going on. 

The Symonds Street, New North Road upgrade (2023-24)

The larger plan here has been in the works for a while, initially as the Integrated Corridors Programme in 2018, and now as Connected Communities. This project is an upgrade from the beginning of Symonds Street and along New North Road all the way out to Avondale, with a focus on establishing and improving bus lanes. Auckland Transport has been consulting on three basic approaches:

A: Two routes: This would be the quickest to build, with no road widening and bike lanes consigned partly to roads off the main corridor.

B: Minimal kerb changes: This keeps bike lanes along the whole corridor, but only does some road widening.

C: Road widened: The most onerous and costly option, but the most future-proofed.

The implications for Uptown are different to almost everywhere else on the route, because Upper Symonds Street is already very wide. In our precinct, the opportunity is more about connecting the community that’s bisected by the road and taking the opportunity to enhance Uptown as a town centre.

The Uptown Business Association has submitted feedback emphasising the view that a blanket approach for the whole route will not meet Uptown’s particular needs. It has opted for option A, with a bidirectional cycle lane on the south side of Upper Symonds Street and short-term parking retained outside the shops and restaurants on the north side, along with more pedestrian space and provision for outdoor dining. A bidirectional cycle lane would stay on the south side of the top of New North Road also. For the rest of New North Road, the business association favours the option of a single city- bound bus lane, because it allows wider footpaths.

Consultation on the three options has closed now, but there will be another chance for feedback around the middle of the year, once the preferred option is chosen. 

Cycle infrastructure (2023-24)

This is part of the street upgrade, but our thinking should be extending beyond the corridor itself – if we don’t ask for these things, we don’t get them. Uptown is adjacent to the most important piece of bike infrastructure in the city, the Northwestern shared path, but connections to it are currently neither intuitive or always safe – and depending on what you’re trying to do, riding through Uptown can be outright scary.

All the options in the upgrade include a bike lane on Symonds Street, but having safer, more intuitive connections to it, either directly up from the path to New North Road, along New North Road or around the Alex Evans Street intersections, is something Uptowners will want to think about. The ultimate promise is one of good, safe cycle connections in all directions: via the Light Path (the “Pink Path”), the Grafton cycleway, Mangere on the Southwestern path and, soon, into New Lynn via the Avondale to New Lynn path. 

Walking (2023-24)

Like the bike lanes, this is part of the Connected Communities street upgrade. The business association wants better general walkability and favours options offering wider footpaths – but also wants to simply see the roads that run through Uptown made easier and safer to cross. Getting walking right could have a huge influence on Uptown’s general liveability. 

The City Rail Link (2025)

We may have mentioned the CRL before in this magazine. Just a bit. The redesigned Mt Eden/Maungawhau station in Uptown will play a

key role in the biggest, most expensive ($4.4bn) transport project to date in New Zealand. It’s the interchange between the new City Rail line from Britomart and the existing Western line, which heads out to the north-west in one direction and Newmarket and the south in the other.

The scale of the works to integrate the two lines is such that the station isn’t expected to reopen until the project is completed in 2025. When it does, it won’t simply be another stop on the line, but a civic centre in itself. The Uptown Business Association continues to talk to central and local government about what the station should offer and the potential for the land that will be freed up on completion.

But it’s evident that there’s a further conversation to be had in light of the other transport announcements – one around how the new facility interacts with all the other other transport modes and the ways the community uses them. 

Auckland Light Rail (2032?)

The newest entrant to the Uptown transport mix is so new that many of the decisions on exactly where it will go and where our local station will be located have yet to be made. Work on a detailed business case and community consultation is likely to take two to three years and the line itself will take a further six to eight years to build.

What we do know is that there will be a 24km route from Wynyard Quarter, past the universities along Symonds Street and out to Mangere and the airport, with as many 18 stations. The government will foot most of the bill and Cabinet opted this year for a tunnelled underground route as far as Wesley in the shadow of Owairaka Mt Albert, then on the surface alongside State Highway 20 to Mangere.

Wesley and neighbouring Mt Roskill are already into a huge housing development programme whose growing population will need a high- capacity transport connection. Auckland Light Rail has projected that an extra 66,000 households (or 156,000 people) will eventually be living along the route. ALR stations will also reshape the communities where they are built.

But what’s it mean for Uptown? More options, basically. Our conversations with ARL indicate that there will be a station either just inside Uptown’s boundaries or nearby in Kingsland, where it would connect with the heavy-rail Western line. If it’s the latter, we’ll want that New North Road bus corridor to be humming. If it’s the former, we’ll want to know how it links with Maungawhau/Mt Eden station.



Uptown residents will want to think about the length of the run between the “education quarter” by the universities and their nearest station. Also, decisions around the ALR route might bring to a head some other questions – including the fate of the Dominion Road flyover, constructed in the 1960s for a motorway that never happened. One proposal to demolish the flyover and make the land available for mixed housing development has stalled. But depending on where the line and the station go, Auckland Transport may have decisions to make on the flyover’s future.