Sydney is Australia's biggest city and an event this week underscored just what a fine edge our road transport balances. At 6-40 am a woman driving a rental van across the Sydney Harbour bridge fell asleep at the wheel, drifted into oncoming traffic and collided with a Taxi, resulting in a multiple car accident. Emergency services rushed three people to hospital, the wrecks were removed and the lanes reopened by 8 am - but the chaos this caused lasted for another three hours.
That's all it takes to create a traffic snarl that extends for twenty-one kilometres and reaches into the suburbs from Epping to Eastlakes. Economists calculate that it probably cost the economy about fifty million dollars and the ripples reach far and wide. Very many people on their way to the airport missed their flight. The entire Sydney Tax fleet sat idle and without income for a vital portion of the day, and the Transport industry will be a long time sorting out the cost of missed "Just in time "deliveries to production factories and the supermarkets of the city, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who arrived seriously late for work.
Every time this sort of thing happens we hear calls for more spending to widen existing roads and create new highway systems. The point that seems to be missed is the "interconnectivity " that ensures that any blockage on any of the vital arterial roads will have a knock-on effect and snarl the interchange that inevitably occurs when these traffic streams converge. Once the traffic stream comes to a standstill - the "shunting effect "comes into play and it takes a lot of time to return to an even flow.
It is probably amazing that the event that had countless drivers fuming this week does not happen more often. We consider it a "normal commute "when we creep along at a snails pace and often see pedestrians on the footpath making faster progress than the car stream, but what Sydney experienced with that bridge crash was - Gridlock. That is fortuitously rare.
Usually we only get gridlock resulting from a major traffic accident. Someone tries to drive a high load truck through one of the Sydney road tunnels or a semi trailer with an inflammable cargo catches fire on an expressway. Unfortunately, no amount of road widening or the provision of new road links will remove that problem. None of our road systems exist in isolation - and when one stops it is inevitable that the flow on connection will radiate widely.
This fuels the debate between the public transport lobby and our love of the automobile. It is a fact of life that whenever we do manage to create an unobstructed roadway that allows car traffic to move freely - it sends more people to drive their cars and depletes the numbers travelling by train or bus. On the other hand, congested roads and slow commutes compel many to abandon the car and seek the reliability that public transport delivers.
Right at this moment the debate in the political world is between selling off this state's "poles and wires "to private equity to free up money for the infrastructure that is so badly needed - and yet the big ticket items are divided between better public transport and a bigger and better road network.
On the one hand, we are reinstalling trams in the inner city and building a new rail structure to service the western suburbs, and at the same time planning to deliver more cars into the city by way of a vast new road network.
That seems to be the way of politics - to cover all options !
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