The " Money/Roads/Cars " triangle !

There is something depressingly familiar about the " Money/Roads/Cars " triangle.   The more money we spend to built new roads and widen existing ones seems to be instantly negated by the increase in car numbers - which fill the space we have created.

The statistics deliver a litany of bad news.  Each survey reveals that Sydney's arterial road traffic runs a bit slower each year, despite toll increases delivering more money to the roads pool.  We are urged to leave the car at home and use public transport to commute to work.  We urge industry to relocate jobs to smaller cities and towns.   We talk of altering start and finish times to spread commute drive times.   We once hoped that the computer would eliminate the need for a commute as people worked from their homes - but like the notion of a " paperless office " - this failed to materialise.

Now the road planners are having a re-think on the toll question.   The original idea was to charge a toll to pay for each new road and then discontinue the toll when the debt reduced to zero.   Now the thinking is along the lines of " Distance rated tolling ", which means reintroducing tolls on those roads now toll free and extending tolling incrementally from the distant suburbs to the city centre.

This concept seems to adopt a two stage plan for car taxation.   The money you pay for registration and green slip insurance permits you to legally drive within your home municipal area.   That's just fine for getting the groceries or dropping the kids off at school, but if you use the city arterial road system, then a new charge based on distance comes into effect.    The more distance you travel - the more toll you pay !

The statisticians predict that we need to spend $ 30 billion over the nest twenty years to give the city of Sydney a decent arterial road system.   The only way that sort of money can be found is by installing a distance rated toll that will apply to all road users.

For the people of Wollongong it probably means the re-installation of a toll booth on the F-6 at Waterfall to pay for the eventual extension of the F-6 to St Peters in inner Sydney, but like all such improvements, that could be long term - and many years from now.

Unfortunately, no matter how promising the plans to fix the road system seem, most people know that the " Money/Roads/Cars" triangle will always be with us.    The equation that matters is - increased population means more people driving more cars - irrespective of how many new roads we build.

That is an unalterable " fact of life " !