Lynton Grace: Another day, another massive traffic delay in the Hills
A truck sticks out 30cm, and kilometres of cars line up. A truck rolls over – the driver not hurt, thankfully – and the entire freeway is blocked for hours. Is it time to seriously revisit passenger trains?
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It’s happened again.
The fourth South-Eastern Freeway delay since October – when a truck ran out of fuel on a hill just before Bridgewater and couldn’t *quite* make it completely off the road.
That mere 30cm caused a massive line-up of cars, stretching back for kilometres. What if it had happened on a day of high fire danger?
What if it’d happened when the Cudlee Creek fire broke out, that day on December 20, when hundreds of families left their homes?
Today, a chicken truck rolled about 3.30am near Crafers, blocking the entire freeway for hours.
The flow-on effect hit much of Adelaide, with hundreds of extra cars blocking Greenhill Rd and Norton Summit Rd(s) and main arterial roads into the city, as commuters detoured around the freeway.
In January, a truck fire on the uptrack – at 4.57pm on a Tuesday, no less – caused huge traffic delays.
That same week, a car burst into flames on the freeway reducing traffic to one lane.
Living in the Hills means living with freeway delays – no one’s arguing that. You get the wide open spaces (unless certain developers get their way), the views, the lifestyle … and the traffic.
It’s part of country living.
But as 20,000 people are set to move to Mt Barker in 20 years and satellite towns are set to grow, something has to change.
The question isn’t, what if a crash or fire banks up traffic on a high fire-danger day. It’s when.
After huge fanfare, the Liberal Government dumped their signature GlobeLink, claiming their election promise had been fulfilled because they’d examined the business case.
It concluded neither the proposed second airport, planned freeway connection or freight rail upgrade would deliver a benefit that justified the immense costs involved.
Convenient. Almost like it was never going to happen.
So what can be done? A truck-only route through the Hills would be hugely expensive, not to mention difficult to establish just where it would run.
Passenger trains are easily the first thing to consider. There are existing track lines and stations. Plus, there’s historically been a high call for their return.
There’s a big nostalgia element to this. Long-term Hills dwellers would remember catching the train from the beautiful brick-built Mt Lofty train station. I wonder if a big part of many people’s wish for passenger trains back in the Hills is the sheer romanticism.
The cost would again be high.
A third option – and probably one that should be part of the trains – is to add a third lane to the SE freeway, where possible, between Stirling and Mt Barker.
Not that a third lane would prevent today’s delays, of course.
Parts of the freeway are rutted, wrecked by the constant trucks, and while those sections are occasionally patched, those patches quickly deteriorate.
A third lane would allow cars to better get around trucks and avoid the damaged sections.
Again – none of this is cheap.
But we’re talking tens of thousands of people expected to move into the Hills over the next few decades.
Such an influx of people means more than school upgrades, hospitals, and local road infrastructure – it means forward thinking by the State Government, other than fanciful freight transport links it knew probably wasn’t going to work out.
The State Government is currently trying to work out how the finish North-South corridor. Maybe it needs to also think about an East-West corridor.
Have you got an idea? Let us know in the comments.