Over 60,000 vehicles are expected to use Euston Road, and just under 60,000 are expected to use Campbell Road. This is close to 10 times as much traffic as Euston Road currently carries, and fully five times the traffic Campbell Road currently carries. Both roads will be busier than Victoria Road.
Campbell Road will be widened as far north as Unwins Bridge Road, and extended south to Gardeners Road via a new bridge over the Alexandria Canal. Euston Road will be widened as far north as Maddox Street, where one of the extra lanes will end with a left turn into Maddox Street. The roundabout at the intersection between Sydney Park Road and Euston Road will be replaced with traffic lights, and right hand turns into Sydney Park Road will be banned, except for buses. Rat-running through local streets seems to be not only inevitable, but intended.
As users of the existing roads will be aware, traffic in the area is already bad, and unsurprisingly, the EIS predicts that if the project goes ahead congestion will become much worse. Oddly, the EIS predicts that if nothing is done, congestion will improve, even though new housing developments in and around Alexandria and Erskineville are set to add an additional 150,000 residents.
The WestConnex is currently forecast to cost $18 billion, although the forecast has been going up by about $2 billion a year since it was first announced with an expected price tag of $10 billion. Duncan Gay, Minister for Roads, Maritime and Freight, has said that the State will get its money back. History and basic mathematics are against him. The Cross City Tunnel only cost $1 billion to build, and it couldn’t turn a profit. The New M5 is going to cost at least $3.5 billion, and it is forecast to carry only half the traffic that the Cross City Tunnel does. There is no way that the New M5 can be profitable, however expensive the tolls are – and the more expensive the tolls are, the fewer people will use the New M5 and the more people will use the free alternatives.
To help pay for the New M5 tunnel and its sister tunnel, the M4 East, tolls are being put back on the M4, and on parts of the M5 that are not currently tolled. The EIS predicts that this will reduce traffic on the M4 and the M5 by so much that, even in 15 years time, it will not have recovered to where it is today. Those who can afford to pay up to $10 each way to travel on WestConnex will save a few minutes – if only until they try to emerge into gridlock at St Peters.
Those who cannot afford the toll will be forced onto other free roads, which will be more congested than they are now. This will be especially so if the Department of Transport acts on a proposal in the EIS to convert lanes on the Princess Highway and Parramatta Road into bus lanes.
The New M5 brings not just traffic, but pollution. Inner-city residents are already exposed to levels of PM2.5 particles and other pollutants that exceed national guidelines. Unsurprisingly, the EIS predicts that WestConnex will make these levels significantly worse. The exhaust stacks (which the EIS calls ventilation stacks) will be unfiltered, and there will be two of them within a few hundred metres of St Peters Public School.
Roads, especially tunnels, are expensive, and move relatively few people – perhaps 2,000 vehicles per hour per lane. This is a fraction of what can be moved by heavy rail, or light rail, or bicycles.
The EIS business case says that with toll roads, “losses to investors [are typically] due to traffic demand forecast being overly optimistic. This has led to a situation where it is likely the private sector sponsors will be unwilling […] to take on all or part of the development and start up traffic risk [and instead the NSW government will take the risk].” Why does the NSW government think that WestConnex can be profitable when the private sector does not?
The New M5 is a waste of taxpayers’ money that could be better used elsewhere, such as on projects that improve transport infrastructure out west or in the regions, or in our area to help us cope with the massive rise in density that we are facing over the next ten years. The $18 billion that WestConnex will cost is more than the cost of the Western Sydney Transport Infrastructure Program and Fixing Country Roads combined.
Anthony Albanese, Labor Member for Grayndler, Shadow Minister for Transport & Infrastructure and Shadow Minister for Cities, has called on the Auditor General to audit WestConnex. NoW-PT, a pro-public transport action group, has a petition calling for such an audit, which can be found here.
Ron Hoenig, Labor Member for Heffron, has called for the New M5 to be scrapped. Mehreen Faruqi, Greens MLC and Transport and Environment spokesperson, and Jenny Leong, Greens Member for Newtown and spokesperson for WestConnex, have gone further and called for WestConnex to be cancelled entirely and for the allocated funds to be redirected to public transport.
Alexandria Resident Action Group Convenor Vanessa Knight also called for the project to be cancelled, describing the EIS as “smoke stacks and mirrors”.
Residents were given until January 29 to submit formal objections. There have been calls for an extension of time to object. Assuming no extension is granted, people wishing to register an objection to the WestConnex project should contact their local members of parliament.
