Why fancy new roads don’t solve congestion

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal land. This is ABC News Daily. It’s part of the biggest road project ever built in Australia. But when the complex maze of tunnels and roads opened in Sydney last month, it became apparent there was a major design flaw causing traffic chaos. So how did planners get it so wrong? And why in Australia do we rely so heavily on motorways? Today, transport planner from the University of Technology Sydney, Michelle Zeibots, on the political decisions keeping us off public transport and in traffic jams. Michelle, for people living in Sydney, it’s been hard to miss the talk of the traffic chaos since the opening of what’s known as the Rozelle interchange in the city’s inner-west.

ABC News Audio: It has been a lot of unhappy drivers on the road this week.

ABC News Audio: It was meant to help ease some of Sydney’s growing pains and improve traffic flow from the city’s sprawling west. But in its first week of operations, the Rozelle interchange has only added to the frustrations of many motorists.

Sam Hawley: Chaos is probably an understatement, right?

Michelle Zeibots: Yes, the traffic congestion has been very severe and I think it’s taken a lot of people by surprise.

ABC News Audio: It’s taken me 40 minutes to get out of Balmain just to get to the Anzac Bridge. It is a disaster.

ABC News Audio: It’s dysfunctional.

ABC News Audio: Living here my whole life. I’ve never seen anything like it, ever.

Michelle Zeibots: The Rozelle interchange was meant to be something that would solve a lot of problems, but instead what has happened is that it’s created far more traffic congestion and more traffic chaos, as people are saying, than what the network was experienced prior to its opening.

Sam Hawley: Yes, it’s actually made things worse. Even the actor Rebel Wilson shared her frustration on Instagram. She said thanks for making a 15 minute trip into the city 90 minutes. So things are actually worse than they were before it opened.

Michelle Zeibots: Yes. Well, I think what she’s experiencing is the changes to the lane configurations, where we’re seeing traffic funnelled into areas where people and drivers haven’t been familiar with.

ABC News Audio: There are now more cars competing to use the same existing lanes. And what used to be seven lanes turning into four has now become ten lanes turning into four.

Sam Hawley: At first, officials and the local mayor, Darcy Byrne, were saying it was all motorist confusion. It was just people, you know, getting used to the new conditions and it would all settle down.

Darcy Byrne, Mayor of Leichhardt Council: This is fairly predictable. It’s not a surprise to me that it’s been chaotic at the start. And these are exactly the challenges that we articulated over the last decade.

Sam Hawley: But actually it’s become apparent, hasn’t it, that it’s a failure in planning. And while the road itself is, of course, of little consequence to most of us, most Australians, that a major project of this nature could go so wrong is concerning, right?

Michelle Zeibots: It is. What we need to see the Rozelle interchange as: it’s the culmination of a series of cycles, and some people might say stuff ups. What’s happened is that a motorway section is built. It generates more traffic or induced traffic growth, as it’s called. And then that shifts the bottleneck from one point or the traffic jam and the gridlock from one point in the network to another. But each time we do that, the traffic becomes worse, the gridlock becomes more extensive in its scale. What it does in that process is it sets up the conditions for the construction of the next section of motorways. We’ll probably hear at some point that the Rozelle interchange was never meant to be a solution to traffic congestion. It’s there to facilitate the construction of further motorways, which includes another tunnel under the Sydney Harbour and then a motorway out to the northern beaches. So it’s a cycle that just keeps on continuing and it’s been going through various iterations along those lines for the last 30 years.

Sam Hawley: This project, Michelle, in its entirety, is known as WestConnex.

WestConnex Promotional Video: WestConnex is the highest priority project for New South Wales. 33km of motorways will transform Sydney’s traffic congestion.

Sam Hawley: Just to give me more of a sense of a scale of this, this road project cost somewhere in the vicinity of $20 billion. How does this spaghetti junction compared to other road systems around the world?

Michelle Zeibots: It’s difficult to answer that question without also talking about the public transport networks that run parallel to road networks. How do we compare? Well, certainly in decades gone by, a lot of people were making comparisons with the way in which Sydney was developing with Los Angeles.

ABC News Audio: This is the city that tore up the tram tracks to build freeways. A city now is well known for its traffic and freeways as the Disneyland in Hollywood.

Michelle Zeibots: And maybe not so much today, but in the past, Los Angeles was renowned for its extraordinary traffic jams. It was a city where it removed a lot of its public transport, and it built a lot of motorways. And I can remember the former premier, Bob Carr, saying we don’t want to end up like Los Angeles. But WestConnex, I think, is pushing us more towards that kind of future, which is unfortunate. And I don’t think it’s the future that the vast majority of people want.

Sam Hawley: Mhm. All right. Well Michelle let’s look then at the failings here more broadly because you think they warrant a royal commission. So what would a royal commission look at.

Michelle Zeibots: So the history and the development of WestConnex has, yes it’s got a political element to it. Yes, it’s got some very complex relationships between government and the private sector. And yes, it also has the material outcomes from building more motorways in areas that probably were unsuited to that form of transport development and really needed to have better public transport built instead. A Royal Commission would have the potential to look at all of that.

Sam Hawley: And Michelle, you think there’s a cycle of costly roads being built and that’s not improving but worsening congestion. And that’s not just a problem, of course, in Sydney that would be a problem everywhere around the country. So just explain what you mean by that and why more roads worsen congestion and don’t improve it.

Michelle Zeibots: Well, many people have probably heard the term induced traffic growth, and I’m an induced traffic growth expert. And one of the things that I did in order to earn that title was to go and look in great detail at the before and after traffic volumes when a section of the M4 motorway from Mays Hill to Prospect was opened back in 1992.

Sam Hawley: That’s in Sydney.

Michelle Zeibots: Yes, in Sydney. And what I was able to show was that overall, there were 11,000 additional trips being made at a key point on that motorway within about three months of the motorway opening. What we also found at that time was that there were people coming off the parallel Western Sydney rail line, and this adds another dimension to it all. What we find is that most people are making choices about which mode of transport they’re going to take, based on whichever option is quicker.

Sam Hawley: All right. So it sounds like the more motorways that we build at great expense means the more reliant on cars we become. And we really do love the car in Australia, don’t we, Michelle? It’s quite stark when you go into a European city, how different it is here than it is overseas in some areas.

Michelle Zeibots: Well, I don’t think that Australians love their cars. I think that what’s happened is that Australian governments have loved building roads, and unfortunately, people can only use the networks that are provided to them by the governments that are in power. And if a government chooses to go and build extensive motorways, then we get the induced traffic growth. Indeed, if we build motorways in European cities, we get induced traffic growth there as well. But in European cities, more choices have been made to provide comprehensive public transport networks that are operating at high levels of service, at high frequencies. And that’s why in many cases, there are more people using public transport. Let’s not blame the average motorist or the average person in the street. When we look at transport policy and who it is that decides to build things, and this is why we need a royal commission, when we see who it is that decides to build things and what their reasons were for doing it, then we begin to understand why it is that we end up in the pickle that we’re in now. And it’s a very big pickle indeed.

Sam Hawley: It sure is. All right. So urgent action is being taken in the case of the spaghetti junction in Sydney. Many motorists will welcome that, of course. But what are the big takeaways from that? It looks like it’s a pretty good lesson in what not to do.

Michelle Zeibots: Well, the big question that we all need to ask ourselves now is what is the impact on our economy generally? Because what we also need to take on board is that the conditions in New South Wales and the emerging conditions across the country are now different to what they ever have been before. And that is that we have state governments now that are carrying very large debts. There’s been some discussion about the possibility of the New South Wales government subsidising tolls, especially to help low-income households. Is feeding state money – that is our taxes – into the private tollway sector, is that really a good use of our money? I don’t think we should. I think we need to see more metros that are going to improve the operations of our existing road network. But the other big fear that I have is that when you start overspending on road infrastructure in the way that we have with the Rozelle interchange, what you’re generally doing is you are making your input costs to production, generally in your city, you are making them higher. And you are making your city less competitive as a location point for industries. It means that everything is more expensive when transport costs more. It’s not just the congestion, it’s the cost of the energy or the fuel. It’s the cost of the roads. It’s the cost of the construction and operation of those roads. And I don’t think that’s where we want to be in the near future.

Sam Hawley: So your message is less roads, more public transport.

Michelle Zeibots: It is that. But it needs to be clever public transport. We need to make sure that there’s a very efficient operations of our public transport. In relation to the Rozelle interchange, we need to see public transport along the key routes that are weaving through that area. We need to make sure that the outfall from the Rozelle interchange doesn’t negatively impact on bus routes and other public transport within that area. That’s a principle that I think can be applied to any Australian city and every Australian city.

Sam Hawley: Dr. Michelle Zeibots is a senior lecturer at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Technology Sydney. This episode was produced by Lara Corrigan, Bridget Fitzgerald, Nell Whitehead, Anna John and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. To get in touch with the team, please email us on [email protected]. Thanks for listening.