WestConnex: as one mad vision dies another is born

WestConnex? It’s like some sort of mythical promised land; a revhead Zion; a grimy, polluted, light-on-the-hill; a throwback to a petroleum economy that’s already dying.

For some bizarre reason all the mainstream politicians genuflect towards it. And all its boosters have a different version of the thing, each more fabulous, expensive, unworkable and just plain loony than the last one you heard about.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald (April 14) they’ve sort of quietly but officially abandoned the idea of putting the road in a six-lane slot from Strathfield to Taveners Hill.

Well duh. What obscenely overpaid idiot dreamed it up? You don’t need to be a genius to imagine what the problems with the slot were going to be. Parramatta Rd is already six lanes wide through most of the section where they were thinking of that “solution”. And as well as the six sunken lanes, they were going to have a couple of local traffic lanes on either side, so you’d be looking at a total of about ten lanes.

How did they think they were going to get possession of the six existing lanes of Parramatta Rd from Strathfield to Taveners Hill while they ripped up the existing road, relocated all the services beneath or alongside it, dug the trench, lined it with concrete and laid the road?

Where were they going to shift the existing traffic stream to? They’d have to have relocated it, somewhere. Can you imagine? Essentially, driving between Strathfield and the CBD would have become virtually impossible for many years.

And by the time they opened the thing, anybody who used to drive that way, for commuting or whatever, would have totally given up, even if, by then, the rising cost of fuel hadn’t already defeated them.

Who knows? Maybe the plan was to build temporary replacement lanes – three on either side – and then do the road in the slot.

Maybe that was it. But you’d have to have to bought up absolutely all property on both sides of the road, for five kilometres and torn it all down in order to build the temporary lanes, and they’d have been far enough back from the edges of the existing Parramatta Rd for there to be space for the machinery used to sheet pile the edges of the slot. That probably ruled out reusing the temporary lanes as the flanking roads after the sunken lanes opened.

And chaos and destruction wouldn’t have stopped there. Remember, there had to be ways to get traffic into and out of, the slot, and that meant entry and exit ramps and merging lanes and, where these existed, the total width of road would grow to twelve lanes.

Think of all the hundreds of productive businesses that would be closed to do this. Think of all the investment wasted.

And even when the great WestConnex opened, the chaos would only be beginning because part of the plan to finance the thing was to then sell off what remained of the resumed land for high-rise redevelopment. And that would have meant dumping a huge load of extra residents on local government, and we can sure the plan didn’t include finding space for all the extra parks and playing fields they’d reasonably require.

In short, the whole idea was a bit of mad whimsy. Why are Greiner and his band of irresponsible greedheads being allowed to play with the serious business of government in this way? They should have been sent packing right after they proposed putting bus tunnels under the CBD as an alternative to a modern light rail system – an idea Cabinet miraculously rejected.

So now we’re back with the idea of WestConnex in a tunnel – it would have to be six lanes wide for the whole of the Strathfield to Taveners Hill stretch plus a tunnel from there to the CBD, another all the way to Tempe and a long elevated structure down to meet the M5 East at Rockdale. It will need a whole lot of polluting exhaust stacks. And a dozen or more major entry and exit points, each spewing out traffic heaven’s knows where, would be no elegant thing.

It’s high time Premier O’Farrell acknowledged the fact that that peak car use arrive a decade ago and that spending $15 billion on WestConnex when Sydney is crying out for public transport and freight rail infrastructure is just stone crazy.

• Must see: WestConnex: Greiner’s folly – on EcoTransit Sydney’s YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdvqt0ZsCvI