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
Brevity isn’t your strong suit. I’ll keep this simple.
I assume you wouldn’t argue that the current delays will sustain for the foreseeable future. The induction drivers won’t disappear for the foreseeable future. With those 2 things being true, how could you say these delays are induced demand rather than temporary teething issues with opening?
@WaxedWookie @AvonVilla
Because it’s the same story we have seen 1000 times all over the world for 70 Years. You have to look at the problem holistically. Simply thinking about cars and roads, in isolation to the whole city, how people behave, how we live and work, is a recipe for failure. I think this explains the issue well enough.
I’ve been clear I think induced demand will be an issue here. There’s no dispute on that, but you’re refusing to bite the bullet on whether these more extreme teething issues (which I’m asserting aren’t induced demand) will stay.
If you say the delays will stay, I’m confident you’ll be proven wrong in fairly short order - the traffic will ease, proving it’s not induced demand. The scale of the induceed demand can be fairly measured at that point.
If you don’t think the delays will stay when the induction factors remain unchanged, you have to concede this isn’t induced demand - it’s short term teething, which is my position.
@WaxedWookie @MrLee I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I think traffic is likely to remain awful during peak hours on the Anzac Bridge and Victoria Rd. (It’s likely to ease up temporarily over the Christmas break, but will worsen again after Australia Day.)
Even before WestConnex, the Anzac Bridge already wasn’t exactly great during peak hour from all the traffic heading through Drummoyne along Victoria Road.
The new WestConnex motorways have made that worse.
If you’re on the M4 extension, how do you get to the CBD? Either you take the Parramatta Rd turnoff at Ashfield, or you go through the spaghetti intersection to the Anzac Bridge.
If you’re heading from the airport on the new M8, how do you get to the CBD? You go through the spaghetti intersection to the Anzac Bridge.
And if you’re on the M5, how do you get to the CBD? Well, you can take Southern Cross Drive under the airport to the Eastern Distributor, or you take the M8 to the spaghetti intersection to the Anzac Bridge.
During the morning and evening peak, a lot of commuters want to travel to or from the city at the same time. And that traffic is being funnelled from the M4, M5 and M8 on to the Anzac Bridge, and then to the CBD offramps.
The claim was that these new WestConnex motorways were going to take traffic off other roads. So for example the M4 was going to take traffic off Parramatta Road.
What it’s ended up doing is inducing more traffic demand, and that additional demand is being dumped on to the Anzac Bridge.
Parramatta Road is still terrible during peak hour, and there’s now even more cars travelling along the M4.
People have also made housing and long-term travel decisions based on the claims that WestConnex would make car travel quicker to the CBD from western and southern Sydney.
Are there people driving slowly while they figure out which lane to take through the spaghetti intersection? Yes there are.
But. The bigger issue is that the new WestConnex motorways have induced additional traffic demand, and a lot of it is trying to cross the Anzac Bridge.
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.