Minor repairs have become a major issue in Te Atatū Peninsula, where a footpath has residents oscillating between rage and despair.

Brian* has had enough. “Auckland Transport has made a big mess with this traffic and I don’t think it will get any better,” he vents on – where else? – his community’s Facebook page. He wants change. He wants solutions. He wants carnage. He signs off on his post with a classic demand from someone wanting results: “Heads should roll.”

Blair’s over it too. “It took me 15 minutes to move five metres,” he writes about his tiring morning commute. “That was after being at a complete standstill for over 10 minutes.” Likewise, Craig has had a gutsful, calling the situation “abhorrent and an embarrassment IMO”. An exasperated Claire just writes: “Something’s not working!”

When one local suggests they start building their own bridge to the city, another responds: “Guarantee we would get it done quicker than these braindead monkeys”. Many more flagged the niceties completely. Overcome with rage, Susan writes: “The actual fuck is this shit?”

Joy uses just one word to describe the situation: “Numbnuts!”

Right now, the most contentious topic on the intensely popular Facebook page for the gentrified West Auckland suburb of Te Atatū Peninsula isn’t Friday night’s flash floods, developers parking trucks over residents’ driveways or the teens doing burnouts in a Chevrolet El Camino, leaving black streaks on the roads.

It’s the traffic. With one way in and one way out, the suburb’s 14,000-odd residents rely on Te Atatū Road flowing freely to access the rest of Auckland. As developers continue to build multiple townhouses on single-dwelling sites, the area’s population is booming. With people come cars. With severely restricted public transport options comes heaving traffic. Any kind of incident, no matter how minor, can cause jams that last for hours. 

But the latest problem is no mere accident. Auckland Council is upgrading about 300 metres of footpath on either side of Te Atatū Road, from a Z petrol station to a roundabout. To do this, they’re digging out the old footpath and replacing it with a new one on both sides. Safety cones line the road, forcing two lanes of traffic into one.

After two weeks of daily hold-ups to their morning commute, residents are fuming. They’ve turned to the community Facebook page to leave dozens of fiery comments on a daily basis. Many complain of delays adding 45 minutes or more to their morning commute, of traffic backed up at least a kilometre.

This pattern then repeats in the evening. When residents get home, they fume on Facebook. “I moved here in 2012 and it was never like this,” writes one suburban veteran. “Farken council,” writes another, “sack half of them.” One local went one further, dedicating an entire Substack newsletter to the topic.

Scheduled to last two weeks, the work has now lasted nearly three. The slow progress has only made residents more mad. One snaps a photo of council workers eating lunch under a tree, captioning it: “What a joke.” Another complains: “You spend 45 minutes in traffic to go past an area that has NO ONE working on it.” (Auckland Transport confirmed contractors’ official hours are 10am-3pm.)

Te Atatū resident and deputy chair of the Henderson-Massey board Brooke Loader has heard the complaints. She has her own thoughts about the issue. “Myself and fellow board members think that it is extremely bizarre,” she says. She points out there’s an existing footpath running alongside the one being upgraded.  “It’s an example of lack of foresight. Having it at peak hour … is not the best plan.”

Everyone is talking about it. At the local barber, my hairdresser says the traffic has been making her late for work, and forcing customers to cancel appointments because they’re running late, and cars are often backed up in front of the shop. With a smile on her face, she describes those working on the upgrades as “poopy heads”. Another irate resident tells me: “I’m having to rat race in my own suburb.”

The irony, lost on almost no one forced to sit through this mess every morning and evening, is that every commuter makes their way past Te Atatū’s new bus interchange, one so brand spanking it still twinkles brightly in the sun. With ties to the City Rail Link, it’s been built to help the west cope with population rises.

Those rises are forecast to be massive. “The northwest is growing,” confirms AT. “By 2046, it is expected to have 37,000 new houses, 11,000 new jobs and nearly triple the number of people travelling along the Northwestern Motorway.” Ask anyone using the NorthWestern motorway and they’ll tell you it’s not build for the amount of traffic using it now, let alone three time as much – especially with woeful public transport facilities.

The problem? That brand new bus interchange is not yet in use. No one can use it. There is a well documented bus driver shortage, and the project appears to be tied to similar bus interchanges on Lincoln Road and Westgate, which aren’t due to be finished until 2025. (When asked, Auckland Transport wouldn’t confirm the exact date when a bus would grace the interchange for the first time, but The Spinoff understands an announcement is imminent.)

The good news? Te Atatū Road’s footpath upgrades are due to be finished today. The bad news? More roadworks are planned, this time on nearby Taikata Road, another essential part of Te Atatū’s commuting network, and another area bulging with townhouses built by developers. On Facebook, at least one resident seems to realise this: “One way in and one way out. More and more houses [being] built. Sadly it’s your reality. It’s going to get worse. Not much can be done about it.”

* Names have been changed to protect identities.