"It's going to be a bloody disaster": Tell me again about how the second road tunnel under Sydney Harbour won't make congestion worse?
"Civil engineer Les Wielinga, a former CEO at the now-defunct Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA), made the fiery comments at a NSW parliamentary inquiry into the bungled Rozelle Interchange.
"The Western Harbour Tunnel, which is under construction, will allow drivers travelling between the inner west and the North Shore to bypass the CBD.
"Entries and exits to the tunnel will lie at the Ernest Street interchange in Cammeray and near the Falcon Street interchange at North Sydney.
"'It's going to be a bloody disaster,' Mr Wielinga told the upper house committee on Friday.
"Paul Forward, another former CEO of the RTA, told the inquiry he was concerned about the project's design.
"'You've now got three motorways coming out into this short area, and whilst I would recognise there are some exit points, some off-ramps, those motorways are now all going into the Lane Cove Tunnel,' he said.
"'A large number of lanes are going into two lanes at the Lane Cove Tunnel. Sounds familiar?'"
@erkpod@Rentlar Really hoping that opens before the Wallabies matches start this year. Getting current public transport home means at the final transport change I have to wait for busses that only come every hour, and I ALWAYS get there < 5 minutes after the last bus left.
The metro will get me close enough to home it’s just a casual stroll. And is SO much more regular at all hours.
@ajsadauskas@fuck_cars So when are they going to have the courage to close the City West Link and most of Victoria Road through Rozelle? You shouldn't be using those "streets" unless you're local (or a bicycle).
We're halfway to solving these stroads. Let's do it.
The saga of Waverley Park — Melbourne's car-dependent suburban AFL stadium with a planned seated capacity of over 150,000 (not a typo!)
A really good run down by @philip on the plans by the AFL (and its predecessor, the VFL) to build the world's largest stadium in outer-suburban Melbourne.
Unfortunately, a planned railway line past the stadium to Rowville was never built. That meant a massive 25,000-spot car park as the only real means to get there.
While most of it has been demolished and redeveloped for housing, the oval itself still used by Hawthorn Football Club as a training and administration centre.
@awelder@jedsetter@nictea@philip@fuck_cars You often hear from Melburnians that it's the world's most livable city, and how the CBD is laid out nicely in the Hoddle Grid is laid out compared to inner-city.
And how Melbourne's inner-suburban tram network means it has much better public transport than Sydney.
And it's true. Colonial Melbourne, funded by its gold rush, did a much better job at planning than early Sydney.
But after the World Wars, it's a very different story.
Sydney is at least constrained by Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north, the Royal National Park to the south, and the Blue Mountains to the west.
That means the only places for new sprawl are either northwest past Rouse Hill, or southwest around Campbelltown and Camden.
As a result, there's a lot more pressure from developers to densify.
Meanwhile, Melbourne just has the Dandenong Ranges to the east and Port Phillip Bay to the south.
As a result, even right now, you have new housing estates past Pakenham, Melton, Wyndham Vale, and Craigieburn.
As for sprawling Australian capitals, I think Perth has definitely been punching above its weight since the 2000s mining boom.
There's now continuous McMansions sprawl right down the Coast from north of Joondalup to south of Mandurah.
And there's new subdivisions that are closer to Bunbury than they are to the Perth or Fremantle CBDs.
@ajsadauskas@awelder@jedsetter@nictea@philip@fuck_cars And Perth doesn't even have much of a pre-car inner-city, so it's dominated by car-friendly suburbia. The new train lines are good, but it's a pity they run between freeways and thus miss out on local walkable neighbourhoods around them.