jeffrocowboy

On my last trip to Auckland airport it was very slow from Shell station corner to domestic and that was at 630am.

Someone in article mentions it being third world - obviously they have not encountered airport traffic in Manila.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/n...ectid=11763930

NZbutterfly

Definitely need the Flexi fares or stay by the airport!

jpr64

I flew in and out last week. The roadworks are a definite pain in the ..., but it only took me about 45 minutes to get there from the cbd.

dadig

I'm not sure how it is acceptable to take 45 minutes to get to the airport. But it is Auckland after all

sbiddle

Are things any worse than they have been for the past few months? Or are they just warning people because it's Xmas?

Speaking of delays the queue for screening at WLG this morning for gates 21-25 (JQ and NZ gates on the JQ side) extended all the way from those gates back to the Relay store causing flight delays.

Craziest thing of all was an Avsec employee complaining to others it was past her break time and wanting to shut the 2nd screening point.

KeepDiscovering

I commute to AKL airport every Fri afternoon (5-ish pm) to fly to WLG. Those few roundabouts next to giant advertising boards are always congested. Same as one function further out where lot of traffic is turning somewhere (instead of going to airport).

At WLG airport, I also notice that since NZ uses the gates at the JQ corner they become crowded from time to time, esp. when flights are delayed and end up occupying the airbridges for longer than scheduled.

cavemanzk

What does an Wellington based person know about Auckland traffic? Is he trying to infer that Southbond traffic is leaving the South Western at SH20A and routing via the Airport then back on SH20B to SH20? Man thats got to be one painful detor to try an shortcut.

The problem being that:
1. AIAL keeps building more Car Park spaces onsite, and encourages the use of there own carparking services.
2. With the airport developments keep expanding e.g. all the Bussiness Parks just North of the Shopping Centre (Most land owned by AIAL). The only way to head South from these work places is via Puhnui Road. You can't get Southbound from the SH20A to SH20 Link.

On an whole Auckland Traffic has gotten very bad over the last 3 weeks, the previous Friday it took me close to 2hours for an 30km drive home.

Kiwi Flyer

It is always possible to miss flights due to traffic en route to the airport, especially in Auckland. This is nothing new. Accidents. Long weekends. Bad weather. Big events. All cause problems.

A few weeks ago my flight from gate 25 was nearly an hour late departing despite the inbound aircraft being on time, solely because there was only two security lanes (the maximum in the space) for 4 very full A320 flights all trying to leave at the same time. Security ended up calling each flight by flight to be processed, rather than the usual first in first out.

brenrox

In my experieince city bound traffic is looking to avoid the roadworks near Kirkbride, so are travelling to get on the motorway via Puhinui Road. They have widened the roundabout on Puhinui Road, although Puhinui is still single lane so whilst more traffic can use the roundabout, there is no extra lanes to go when they exit the roundabout. They've also put signs up to direct traffic past DHL & the NZ engineering building, but this has just spread the problem and fixed nothing....I was leaving Domestic a month ago at 430pm on a Thursday and traffic was backed up from the domestic drop-off all along Puhinui to the motorway. The roading infrastructure around the airport is no where near appropriate for the current volumes (which are forcast to grow even more)

BZNZ

Tell me about it, one morning got caught in heavy traffic, and got the boarding notification on my AirNZ app while I was in my Uber just passing the airport shopping centre!

It was a regional flight, and just made it (no checked bags thankfully!). Other than that though, it's the closest I've come to missing a flight!

jawnbc

Dropped Himself at domestic this afternoon around 1pm. After reading the report in the Herald we gave ourselves lots of time. So much time, in fact, that we stopped at Carl Jr.'s for lunch. It's still a bit of a mess, but the traffic was much better than the same time last week.

keitherson

The fact that there is no train connection for AKL is absolutely horrendous. the "SkyBus" is basically just an overglorified overpriced public transit bus that still shares the highways with all other ground transport.

KeepDiscovering

Speaking of Skybus, I take it to commute to the airport every Fri afternoon. The Dominion Road service is seriously delayed most of the time. There were several weeks when the xx:12 service was cancelled and I ended up waiting for half an hour at the bus stop for the xx:32 service.

The Mt Eden Road service seems more reliable.

I don't know how weekly commuters who work in Auckland CBD are managing this weekly trip to the airport. They have to endure CBD traffic in addition to the airport road traffic we are talking here.

codyc1515

First time for me travelling to AKL in some years. Arrived in the morning with very little traffic on a Thursday. Departed at 5:30 the following (Fri)day. My god the amount of traffic was nothing I had ever experienced before. I left from Wiri at about 4pm as per suggestions from my coworkers and made it to my flight with about 10 minutes to spare.

b1m9t0

You mean 20 minutes? :P

This is a problem affecting all of Auckland, not just the airport. I leave for work about 6:40am Monday to Friday, getting on SH1 northbound at the Ellerslie-Panmure onramp. I've been doing this drive for about two years and the change over the last <6 months has been glaringly obvious. Where once I might encounter exceptionally heavy traffic once a week, these days it is reversed and there will only be moderate traffic once a week (amusingly one morning this week the lights were out at the intersection just before the onramp and at the onramp itself meaning a straight drive onto the motorway, and it was the most free flowing traffic of the week).

Extrapolate this out to the airport and where you previously had really bad traffic at peak times (i.e Friday afternoon), now it is far more frequent. The road works obviously do not help at all.

Building more/wider/bigger roads is not going to fix the problem. More capacity means more cars to fill it up. We need a train.