Whoopsie! Sydney’s road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway.
For those outside Sydney, the New South Wales state government recently opened a new spaghetti intersection just west of Sydney’s Central Business District.
It was supposed to solve traffic. Instead, it’s turned into a giant car park:
"For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.
"Several months ago, Transport for NSW’s modelling had suggested traffic from the interchange would add only five to 10 minutes to trips on Victoria Road through Drummoyne and over the Iron Cove Bridge during morning peaks.
“Those travel delays have now blown out.”
So what do motorists say when their shiny new road that was supposed to solve traffic instead turns into a massive traffic jam?
‘Dude! Just one more lane!’
From the article:
"[Roads Minister John] Graham and his Transport boss Josh Murray appear reluctant to do what many motorists reckon is the obvious solution.
“That is, add lanes or make changes at the pinch-points that are causing the pain. A three-lane to one merge point from Victoria Road onto the Anzac Bridge, along with two lanes merging into one on the City West Link, are proving to be painful bottlenecks.”
#roads #traffic #cars @fuck_cars @sydneytrains @urbanism #urbanism #UrbanPlanning #motorways #fuckcars
It’s been reported that the travel times are already dropping by 10%+ in the few days since opening… That sure points to these delays being mostly due to teething that’s beginning to ease already.
@WaxedWookie It was also deliberately opened at the end of the year because there’s less traffic demand:
“But the government and motorway operator Transurban – who have a contract to run WestConnex until 2060 – say the traffic peak won’t come until February.”
So the real test won’t be how it performs on a Friday or weekend. It’s how it will do once everyone’s back at work in February.
Again, the underlying issue seems to be extra traffic that wouldn’t be there if the M4/M5/M8 motorway extensions hadn’t opened.
There’s a lot of traffic being funnelled on to a bridge that was already at capacity.
“Since the project opened on 19 November, morning drivers have headed into the city and found three lanes on two of the main arterial roads abruptly merging into one. Feeder streets from nearby suburbs were jammed, with movement slowing to barely one block an hour at the worst of the crunch times.”
The Inner West Council is claiming that department officials were concerned behind closed doors in the months before the interchange opened:
"Darcy Byrne, the mayor of Inner West Council, oversees a region that has endured a decade of dusty and noisy construction. He says Transport for New South Wales officials ‘were very concerned’ in briefings three months ago about how WestConnex was going to perform.
“‘We have warned for a very long time [that] when you tried to funnel such a greatly expanded amount of traffic into the same number of lanes at the Anzac Bridge at Victoria Road, it was going to be a tsunami of traffic chaos,’ he said.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/dec/02/a-tsunami-of-traffic-chaos-the-new-sydney-motorway-prompting-calls-for-a-royal-commission
I guess we can just revisit this in February then. If the time to get through the mess remains around 90 minutes, we’ll call that one for induced demand. I think a meaningful reduction from that mark toward the actual baseline with induced demand is going to prove otherwise.