Before the general election, the following article was published in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Sydney motorists will be promised $220 million to upgrade one of the worst bottlenecks in the city’s north-west with a wider bridge across the railway at Epping Station in the key federal electorate of Bennelong ahead of the May 21 election.
The federal and NSW governments will outline the 50:50 spending plan on Tuesday with a pledge to widen the road and footpaths around the station, which has become a major growth centre with a metro station as well as rail.
- Sydney Morning Herald, 9th May 2022
Oh how the best laid plans of mice and men collapse in a heap. We have subsequently found out that sections of the Parramatta section of the light rail are to be binned and that other pipe dreams such as the northern beaches tunnel have been flushed away. Yet again, the tale of the infrastructure of Sydney, is one of announcements, dreams that never were, hubris, promises, and wind.
One would normally expect that I would be extremely approving of all public works programs; especially when the works program in question is something that I would personally benefit from. However, it seems to me that I could achieve the same net job; without having to disrupt any of the traffic and services in and around Epping.
"How could you do that?" you might ask; in a justified dollop of incredulity. How indeed? Let me tell you story about the sordid tale of motorways in Sydney and why my solution is actually more sensible than what seems like a perfectly reasonable plan.
First we need to wind the clock back to 1788. The broader city of Sydney was a blank slate upon which the planners could have drawn anything, except there were no planners and they idea that we would even plan a city was not a thing for another 100 years.
Sydney's first road ran from Sydney to Parramatta. The second road ran further west to Toongabbie. A road then went over the mountains. We then built spokes going outwards and only bothered to full in the arterial roads afterwards. The ring road project was only an invention of the 1950s and even a cursory glance at a big map of Sydney still shows spokes and wheels. In other words, Sydney was never ever planned and because it just sort of happened, then all of the traffic issues are the direct result of that lack of planning.
Sydney and Australia arrived at the motorway game very very late indeed. Before the Second World War, Germany had already embarked on an infrastructure project to criss-cross the country in autobahn. General Dwight D Eisenhower liked the idea so much, that as a result of remembering his own days in the army and trying to cross the continent, and with suggestions from Charles Erwin Wilson, the Eisenhower Interstate System was set in motion and with it, the biggest socialist piece of infrastructure in the history of the world. Britain acquired its first stretch of the M6 motorway in 1959; which almost instantly drove half of the gutless cars off of the roads in Australia. As for Australia? We were still trying to work out what was happening to the slip roads at either end of the Harbour Bridge.
In the mid-1960s, plans were set afoot to build the F1 or the Warringah Expressway through the immediate northern suburbs of Sydney. There were also plans to build what was then known as the F2 to the west of the city and northwest through Tarban Creek and probably towards the Pacific Highway at some point. Gladesville Bridge and the Tarban Creek deviation, form roughly 3 miles of motorway grade roads with fully grade-separated intersections. This is where the story gets interesting.
The F2 should have continued north up Tarban Creek; where Epping Road would have been blessed with partial freeway conditions and the configuration of the F2 would have roughly coincided with the current M2. From there the so-called F3 to Newcastle, may have been extended southwards and possibly through Fox Velley to to F2. I think that those alignments were finally achieved with the M1/M2 North extensions.
There is a bit of a hint of what might have been preparation for the F2 as Epping Road has a very short section of motorway grade road which crosses Ryde Road at right angles. The flyover is a fully grade-separated intersection which very curiously has driveways and entrances from private properties onto the slip roads. The western end of this intersection flows into the intersection of Epping Road with Balaclava Road.
However once you get over the top of the next hill, what was once three lanes of traffic, very quickly whittles down into two, before crossing over the railway line at Epping and Epping is a mess of roads which includes Beecroft Road and Carlingford Road.
The idea solution would either be to divert traffic around Epping via some kind of bypass, or a project which would eliminate traffic going through Epping in the first place. I have three solutions.
The Epping bypass already exists. In fact, It is called the M2.
The M2 as it currently stands is a car park in both the mornings and the evenings. The reason for this is that it currently dumps traffic onto Epping Road in the East and most of its traffic onto Windsor Road in the west. The M2 has a few key set of slip roads and intersections but not really that many. Unlike the Eisenhower Interstate System in the United States or the motorways in Britain, the M2 was not necessarily built to alleviate traffic congestion as much as it was to spin a profit for the private owners of the motorway. By limiting access to only a few key points and putting a toll on the road, this acts as both a physical barrier to entry (because you can not get on the motorway unless you use a sliproad) as well as an economic barrier to entry (because only those people who can afford to pay will use the road).
If the M2 had the tolls removed (because quite frankly the idea that there should be a toll on a road at all is downright criminal and a very tory idea indeed), then this would mean that people like myself would be as inclined to use Carlingford Road and Epping Road as a rat run to avoid the tolls. I will readily confess that one of the causes of why there is congestion around Epping, is because I help to cause it.
If the M2 had more sliproads installed which allowed more ingress and egress onto and off the motorway, then this would cause less bottlenecks as traffic would be far more diffused. If you want to empty a bucket in a hurry, then you can either turn the whole thing upside down or start drilling as many holes into the sides of it as possible.
My second solution is as bold as the first; namely that the 2222m of the Northwest Metro from Tallawong to Schofields should be built.
Thousands of people just like me would be encouraged to leave their cars at home and take the train. An 8-car train can take as many as 2000 cars off of the roads and if 2000 cars aren't on the roads then they are also not there to cause a traffic jam in the first place.
This problem should have been addressed when the Northwest Metro was being built and the reason that it wasn't is because the then Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian who we now know was more corrupt than a glass of lemonade with a cat poo in it, simply refused to greenlight extending the Metro into Labor electorates despite the advice given to her. Yet again, this is a very tory idea indeed.
Both of these things if implemented would help to take traffic off the roads, as well as diverting it away from Epping. Now of course as a member of the commentariat who has no power whatsoever, I can be ignored. Arguably, I am such a member.
The third solution is the nastiest. This would be to build some kind of one-way flyover from Carlingford Road, over the top of the railway line and dump traffic onto the quiet streets of the northern part of Epping. This would create a one-way circulatory system through Epping itself. It would be utterly hated by residents because that would mean that traffic would get dumped through a relatively quiet part of Epping and there is a correlation between enforceable nimbyism and the average wages that the residents of a suburb can control.
I note that as we now have an Albanese Labor Government installed and the Liberal Party lost, this 'plan' never even made it beyond the pages of a newspaper. The problem however, still remains. Or rather, it isn't really. Traffic around Epping actually isn't that bad. This promise was only made because an election was happening and like all good election promises this was just one of many announcements, dreams that never were, hubris, promises, and wind
No comments:
Post a Comment