The Inner West Council and Balmain Greens MP Kobi Shetty are pushing the government to develop detailed plans to transform Victoria Road at Rozelle by removing traffic lanes to allow for more public and active transport and wider footpaths, before the motorway tunnels open later this year.
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The state government previously forecast a drop in traffic of up to 50 per cent on part of Victoria Road in Rozelle once a 1.1-kilometre tunnel bypass opens as part of the $3.9 billion final stage of the project. The tunnel will link the Iron Cove Bridge to a massive underground spaghetti junction at Rozelle.
- Megan Gorrey, Sydney Morning Herald, 3rd Jul 2023.
Speaking as a member of the great Sydney public who lives west of the Red Rooster line and therefore whose opinion matters not a jot to the people who lives east of the Red Rooster line, I have serious questions as to why anyone would think that opening a tolled motorway is going to cause "a drop in traffic of up to 50 per cent on part of Victoria Road in Rozelle". Are they mad? Do they like lying? Have they decided to throw all that they know about the world upon the bonfire of ignorance and dance around as though they were making a logic sacrifice to nonsensery and toomfoolery? I can completely understand that the Inner West Council and the Member of Parliament for Balmain object most vociferously to the fact that Victoria Road passes through their electorates but expecting that there will be benefits from narrowing the roads and making people drive more slowly, is dafter than a kangaroo playing tennis in the middle of the Gladesville Bridge.
Traffic as a moving festival of slowness, is similar to other things that flow and move. Broadly speaking, things that flow obey the same sets of rules. Flow of traffic, flow of electrons, and flow of water, can be described with mostly the same sets of mathematical equations and herein lies the problem. Things that flow tend to follow the path of least resistance. In theory adding a brand new pipe should alleviate pressure on an already existing pipe but when that pipe is itself subject to valves and baffles and switches which discourage things from flowing into it, the expected advantage of installing that new pipe is immediately flushed away.
One of the interesting things about the imposition of a toll, is that it is a barrier to entry. Fees generally are a barrier to entry into a marketplace but in this case, the metaphor crystallises as people who do not pay, are not allowed to use the motorway. Of course there will be some people who can not afford to pay. Those people will continue to use Victoria Road at reduced utility. There will also be some people who do not want to pay, if they think that they price is too high. In response to the motorway being opened, the plan from Inner West Council by removing traffic lanes, is actually to discourage people from using Victoria Road by physically reducing the utility of the road even further.
In the case of Epping Road which has been reduced to a one lane road in each direction, beyond Mowbray Road and towards the Pacific Highway, the reduction of utility of the road forced some traffic to run up Mowbray Road via Artarmon and other traffic to head southwards and back towards Five Dock. Part of the reason why Victoria Road's traffic is so bad, is precisely because of another toll-road. As for Victoria Road, another part of the reason why of why traffic is so bad on it is that the opening of the M4 and the subsequent loss of utility of Parramatta Road, has force even more traffic onto Victoria Road. Another part of the reason why Victoria Road's traffic is so bad, is precisely because of another another toll-road.
Inner West Council's solution it seems, is not to improve the road but to choke traffic even harder. This will naturally lead to consequences. We can see what kind of consequences that this will lead to, by looking at the M4 west of Church St in Parramatta. As the M4 is tolled, but only beyond Church St eastbound, then this creates an incentive for people to leave the M4 at Church St. Consequently, what happens is a very long, very ugly, and very slow queue of cars which builds up at about 5am in the morning and remains there until about 8pm at night. On a motorway, where the closing speed between a lane which is crawling along and motorway speeds of 90km/h, this has the potential to be disasterous. The tailback of cars queueing, is typically between about 4km and in the morning peak as much as 10km long. Inner West Council's solution is not going to cause a speed differential between different lanes of traffic but it is absolutely going to cause a tailback; which given that Victoria Road is a main aterial road, looks little more than pure churlishness on the part of Inner West Council.
There is some grain of truth that reducing Victoria Road to a single lane of travel will reduce "traffic" but this smacks of weaponised NIMBYism that has not been properly thought through, if in fact any thought was put into this at all.
Perhaps the most useful equation here is the general equation for Voltage, Current, and Resistance. V = IR. Voltage can be thought of as the speed of traffic. Current is the number of cars per hour. Resistance takes into account the number of useful lanes and the number and operation of the traffic lights et cetera.
This can helpfully be rearranged to form V/R = I.
Since the speed (Voltage) will drop, and the resistance will be greater; that is that V gets smaller and R gets bigger, then I gets smaller as an output.
60/1000 = 0.06
40/2000 = 0.02
Hooray, the traffic flow will be smaller. However, one of the neat things about maths is that it does not care about your stories and is always waiting to make fools of us all. The things driving the drivers, which makes them want to go somewhere (which include going to work, school, university, shopping, et cetera) are still driving the drivers. Just because Inner West Council wants to choke down traffic does not mean that that traffic has any less reason not to go somewhere. There will be some traffic, where the drivers who are prepared to pay the toll will be taken off of Victoria Road but as for everyone else, they will not. For them, all that happens is that there is a slower section, yet another set of resistances that makes their life harder and as proven by the imposition of tolls on the M4, a transposition of tailbacks and worse and longer tailbacks at that, further back up the road.
The really really dimwitted person here is the MP for Balmain and member of The Greens, Kobi Shetty. Her policy of NIMBYism, will actively cause traffic to idle longer, use more petrol, and add to CO2 and NOx emissions. Cars that idle for longer and going nowhere, don't just magically disappear because you moved them 5km up the road.
So who actually wins here? Tollway operators. We should probably drop the pretense at this point and just admit that Inner West Council has likely been persuaded by developers and by the tollway operators themselves. We should absolutely be convinced that the NSW State Government, given the very lone history of MPs being given golden parachutes by private enterprise, actively love finding new and impressive ways of tightening the screws on the good and fair people of NSW. If this actually was about improving traffic, then there wouldn't be tolls on the roads and traffic would move freely; however asking for that is like asking your neighbourhood bully not to beat you up and to give you lollies.
Inner West Council wins (?) because they get reduced "traffic" but they'll now get a far longer and possibly permanent bottleneck. To the immediate west, Ryde Council must surely be spitting chips, losing their bananas, and going nineteen to the dozen with rage. Congratulations, they will now be the new recipient of a brand new traffic snarl as eastbound traffic fights to go from three lanes, back to two and then back to one.
It is pieces like this in the Sydney Morning Herald that actually make we wistful and wish for the days of yore when local newspapers like the Ryde Leader and the Balmain Herald would have po-faced people and angry people pointing at things on the front pages of the newspaper. It is very likely that Inner West Council without as much public scrutiny just decided to jam this through some council meetings with no kickback whatsoever. Meanwhile, the people who live west of the Red Rooster line who have no say but who are immediately affected by this, will just have to treat this like yet another bitter and sour lolly and suck it up.
I do not drive down Victoria Road enough to be troubled by this plan in particular, which means that I am not going to be pained by it, but it still seems to me that between NIMBYism and the greed of private tollway operators who see the public as nothing more than a machine to extract more money from, that the road network of Sydney is actually less useful than it was when I was a kid. Sure, there are more motorways but they don't relieve traffic woes when the roads are then made worse to entice people to use the motorways.
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