For the Common Good !

A lot of people stuck in the commuter gridlock that affects Sydney roads were delighted when both the Federal and State governments signed off on the West Connex motorway.   Finally we are to get a thirty-three kilometre tollway to connect the western suburbs with the Sydney CBD and this will cost $ 11.5 billion.

On Sunday a thousand inner city residents held a protest march in Enmore which they dubbed "the King Street Crawl ".   Amazingly, the objective of this small band of people is to prevent work getting under way on the West Connex because they claim it will "dump traffic into the inner city and clog local streets ".

If that sort of thinking becomes the norm, what hope do we have of ever creating a vibrant city with the facilities that attract residents, create jobs and builds an efficient business hub.  It completely ignores the reality that our inner city can not function without a traffic flow.   All the goods that make it onto the shelves of city stores make that journey by truck, the bus fleet carries passengers to and from their city jobs and the taxi fleets are an essential service for those without a car.  There is a movement to ban private cars from the city centre and rely entirely on public transport and we are reintroducing trams under the guise of "light rail " to make inner city travel easier, but the car will still be needed in it's present form to a lesser degree when the public transport system is finally installed.

The biggest obstacle to progress in all it's forms is the NIMBY factor. No matter what is proposed, the benefits that accrue to the majority of people are almost certain to deliver some sort of detraction to a small number of others.  It seems to be human nature for those others to use public protest and the media to resist change and retain the status quo.   In many cases, they succeed in causing delay and hugely increase the price of whatever is planned.

Exactly this same NIMBY factor is plaguing the new metro rail corridor presently under construction. There is agitation to oppose the siting of stations on the line because residents fear that traffic will increase in their streets and the convenience of a rail station will increase residential density.  They expect that this will increase pressure for leafy residential suburbs to go high rise and that private homes will be replaced with unit blocks.

It is unrealistic to expect that a major city can remain stagnant and without change.  It is impossible to maintain an outward spread indefinitely and the obvious answer is more of the "vertical village "concept - and that means some people need to move to make that possible.  In most cases, a surge in land value where this is happening more than compensates for any inconvenience.

Those thousand people who demonstrated in Enmore are simply swimming against the tide.   The factor that led to the West Connex approval was that it was deemed "for the common good ".
That is the principle that must guide all public works decisions !