WestConnex: A Highway Horror Story
- Douglas Bennett
- Oct 9, 2018
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 10, 2018
The latest solution presented by the New South Wales Government (more specifically the NSW Liberal Party) to solve Sydney’s decades-long congestion problem, has recently been sold off to the toll-road giant Transurban. Despite a lack of design for the third stage of the project (the Rozelle Interchange) and no set contract with any construction company to complete it, the WestConnex project is expected to be completed and operational by 2023.
As a town planner, seeing a project such as WestConnex come to fruition is incredibly frustrating. It just serves as a reminder that town planning is still in the hands of incompetent and corrupt politicians, and not qualified town planners. The entire concept of the project is completely absurd and based on the outdated 1950s logic that congestion and traffic can just be solved by building more roads. Of course, this is the logic that the NSW government used to sell the project to the public. In reality, WestConnex is just another huge toll road that the government has built to appease the private sector’s (specifically Transurban’s) insatiable need to acquire public assets for profit. If we aren’t careful, Sydney will just end up like Los Angeles; A city with minimal public transport and a seemingly never-ending network of dirty highways sprawling across the city.
I have only briefly outlined some of the basics of why WestConnex is a flawed project. There are so many detailed aspects to it that prove why it is poisonous to Sydney. To elaborate further on this, I will discuss a council meeting I attended at Newtown Neighbourhood Centre earlier this year, where state MP for the Inner West Jenny Leong addressed the public on the project. Around 30-40 (mostly older/senior) residents attended the event, most with their own horror stories about the 24-hour construction work occurring near there homes. I was shocked to hear the suffering these people had endured and the absolutely appalling response and lack of humanity on the NSW Governments part. One particular story stuck with me, about a family in St Peters who live quite close to the construction site for the St Peters interchange. The family consisted of a middle-aged couple and their 17-year-old son, who was in the process of completing his final year of high school. However, the noise from the 24-hour construction caused several problems for them. At 3 am, they could not get a wink of sleep over the sound of construction workers building the highway monstrosity outside their home. The son could not study properly for his HSCs either. After filing several noise complaints, the NSW Government finally responded to their pleas- by sending them a pair of earplugs in the mail. This story, in particular, stood out to me, as it epitomises the complete disregard of the people of Sydney in the planning process for this project.
Another truly shocking revelation I discovered during this session, was that the NSW government was proposing to build several smokestacks across the Inner West, with some only being up to 10 metres high. What was truly appalling was the fact that one of the smokestacks is going to be built near Rozelle Public School on Victoria Road, spewing unfiltered (yes unfiltered- somehow spending 17 billion on this project is ok, but springing for filtered ventilation stacks near child care centres is ‘too expensive’) exhaust fumes into the local airspace. You may be asking yourself how this can possibly be legal. After all, the basis of modern town planning has its foundations in the industrial revolution- when people realised the benefits of moving away from industrial buildings and hazardous sites from residential areas. But the NSW government has justified its decision to leave the smokestack(s) unfiltered, on the following findings (From the WestConnex EIS, chapter 9 page 58):
“The overall changes in emissions associated with the project in a given future scenario year (2023 or 2033) would be smaller than the underlying reductions in emissions from the traffic on the network between 2015 and the scenario year as a result of improvements in emission-control technology.”
You read that right. Apparently all the hard work that scientists have put in over the past few decades into making our transport technologies cleaner and healthier for our communities, was actually just to give politicians some “breathing room” (pun intended) in how many toll roads and highways they can cram into cities without exceeding existing (as in the last 30-40 years) air quality. Ensuring that the airspace above our neighbourhoods stays just as dirty as our politicians and government.
The main premise of WestConnex is that it will ultimately save travel time for those travelling from Western Sydney to the CBD. Had the government actually done its research, it would have found that people living in Western Sydney are only half as likely to work in the Sydney CBD. According to an independent report into the project by SGS Economics and Planning, 90% of work trips to the CBD from the west are made by public transport. So why is this being promoted as the solution for those poor Western Sydney commuters, when they don’t really exist? With the recent meltdowns on the Sydney Train network (due to poor management and funding), one could not be blamed for thinking that the NSW government was attempting to push commuters from the failing public transport network and onto our roads. So does WestConnex really solve Sydney’s age-old congestion problem? Or will it just end up like all the other highways in Sydney- clogged up and moving at a snail's pace?
Unfortunately for the people of Sydney, this project is well and truly on its way to becoming a reality. The only flicker of hope is through the current parliamentary inquiry into the project by the NSW Parliament. And even if WestConnex is stopped, and stage three of the project (the final M4-M5 Link) never eventuates, we are still in 17 billion dollars worth of debt, with no actual solution being present.
On a final note, I would like to comment on how this project exemplifies everything that I believe is currently wrong with the current planning system in New South Wales. It simply boils down to the fact that the political sphere and the realm of town planning are too closely enmeshed. In our current system, politics comes before the people and effective town planning solutions. Professional town planners with relevant academic qualifications have been shut out and/or silenced in the planning process by the government. Take the current Minister for WestConnex, Stuart Ayres MP. He is in charge of maintaining the 33 kilometres toll road and overseeing the project as it is constructed. Yet his educational background involves a degree in sports business from the Australian College of Physical Education. How, I ask, does such a degree even remotely relate to planning, operating, and managing part of one of Australia’s most complex highway systems? It's a classic age-old story, that repeats itself far too often in New South Wales, and the people of Sydney suffer from it as a consequence. Town and City Planners aren’t positioned to properly and effectively plan Sydney. Instead we have sports business managers to run our highways, and arts graduates to manage our planning system (Minister for Planning Anthony Roberts MP has a Masters in Arts, specialising in Strategic Communications).
This has only been a brief look and review at some of the fundamental problems of the WestConnex project, as well as my own opinion on the matter. Feel free to comment or contact me to share your thoughts!
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