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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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Fuck Cars
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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.