Did WestConnex Work?

Or why building a queue-jumper just transfers delay.

Late November 2024 saw the opening of the Rozelle Interchange, the final major piece of WestConnex. Still to be done are the Western Harbour Tunnel and all the fixes the major arterials like Parramatta Road and Victoria Road that were promised, as well as the remediated parklands (and possibly a tunnel under Drummoyne).

A number of media links suggest there are problems:

• $3.9b traffic jam as toll-paying WestConnex motorists get right of way (AFR)

• Scott Charlton exits Transurban as traffic snarls WestConnex (AFR)

• Plan revealed to re-route buses in bid to ease Rozelle traffic chaos (DT) [I assumed this was the plan all along, why not have express buses to Drummoyne and points NW? [SMH version of same announcement]

• Rozelle Interchange road test: traffic expert far from impressed (SMH)

  "It’s not just about the cars. McLaren is aghast at the state of the pedestrian and bike paths along Victoria Road, which are especially narrow as they come past the old White Bay power station. In some spots, there are poles on the path.

  “How on earth are you going to get through there as a cyclist?” McLaren asks. “I look at this stuff and I go: I wouldn’t want my kid riding on that.”

• Minister warns commuters to expect another week of Rozelle road chaos (SMH)

• ‘A tsunami of traffic chaos’: the new Sydney motorway prompting calls for a royal commission (Guardian)

• 'Clear it would be a disaster': Sydney's Rozelle Interchange issues will be ongoing, road experts say (ABC)

  "Before the Rozelle interchange opened, seven lanes merged into four on the Anzac Bridge. Now, 10 lanes are merged into four with the extra lanes from the spaghetti junction."

  "“It is a forever problem because the system is funnelling too many people into a road that is too small. They assumed the Anzac Bridge could support more cars than was physically possible," [Sydney transport expert Mathew Hounsell] said.

  "“Trying to shovel a motorway into the middle of a city was never going to work. The previous government and the roads department stuffed it up. They didn’t want to listen to anyone who would tell them it was not going to work.

  "The former Coalition government stated repeatedly that traffic flows on Victoria Road would be reduced by 50 per cent when the interchange opened, a “claim that is laughable now” ... Inner West Council’s Labor mayor Darcy Byrne said.

  "

• How Planners got Rozelle Traffic Modelling Horribly Wrong (SMH)

• Westconnex: a $20bn money pit or a bold plan for Sydney’s future? Experts remain divided (Guardian)

• 2GB Interview (30 November 2023 with Michael McLaren and David Levinson) (2GB)

I have my opinions of course.

Conceptually, this project is a primarily a queue jumper. It brings people from Western Sydney to the primary bottleneck, the ANZAC Bridge, faster. This means those travelers displace others in the queue. If we assume the ANZAC Bridge has fixed capacity, and had demand that filled that capacity before, we are just changing people’s positions in the queue to use the Bridge. Traffic lights on Parramatta and Victoria Roads previously served as meters to the queue, limiting the number of arriving vehicles. With those uncorked, those vehicles get ahead in the queue, and others, who do not take improved approaches, get pushed back. We are moving delay around. There are now new winners (Western Sydney) and new losers (The Inner West). The Bridge capacity did not increase. Given the cost of the project, this seems a pretty expensive way to transfer delay.

Further, to the extent the Bridge adds capacity for Western Sydney, it will induce demand from Western Sydney. This will lead to additional negative externalities (air pollution, particularly) suffered by those on their path (especially the Inner West).

Not all is lost:

There are some potential benefits. If you use the new facility part of the way, but exit before the ANZAC Bridge onto some previously uncongested facility, you are better off. (Not everyone is going to the City). Or if you then take the M4-M8 connector south in the morning, and avoid the Bridge, you are better off.

In off-peak times, when the Bridge is not saturated, there are overall benefits.

In the outbound direction, in both the morning and afternoon, there are overall benefits, as east of the Bridge was not expanded, but once people clear the City and the Bridge bottleneck, they then have fewer congestion points than previous without causing others much delay.

If the Bridge was not being maximally loaded previously, this may load the bridge more efficiently, leading to better utilisation (I don’t believe this particularly, but it is within the realm of the possible).

When the Western Harbour Tunnel opens, people who previously used the ANZAC Bridge and the Harbour Bridge will now be able to go directly north on the WHT (and in the reverse direction), somewhat relieving traffic on the ANZAC Bridge.

In any case, people will learn and adapt, and a new dynamic equilibrium will be established as people figure out what their best strategy is. This might take a few weeks or months given the holidays, and some people will need to find new routes. The world adapts.

All right, not the ideal case, but not quite as bad as is being made out. Now that we have this overpriced asset, with a toll that’s too high (and thus ironically the toll section is underused compared to optimal, while local roads are overused) what do we do with this? We should be using WestConnex primarily for freight and public transport and other higher priority trips foremost. That this route isn’t coupled with express buses already is a disappointment.

A diagram of Spaghetti Junction. Calling it Spaghetti Junction does Spaghetti a disservice.

OpenStreetMap rendition of the Rozelle Interchange and Environs. [OSM]

Aerial Photo by Bambul Shakibaei. Used with permission.

In process diagram

Headier Days

Nevertheless, this fiasco is an embarrassment to TfNSW, and their former RMS group, who should have done a better job overall in anticipating this, and warning their bosses about it. (I suspect the lower level people knew the issues, told middle management, who informed senior management, who covered it up and did not tell the politicians properly, but that’s just speculation). The Anti-WestConnex groups warned about this and more, as shown in the following photos of protest signs still lingering in the community.

Stop WestCONnex Sign, 2017. Parent hold child’s hand, both wearing gas masks.

WestCONnex Won’t Work! Public Transport Will! Sign from 2016.

WestCONnex Won’t Work! Public Transport Will. Sign from 2017.

My interview with Michael McLaren (2GB) below [automated transcript, so there will be errors, some editing applied]:

--:--/10:01

Michael McLaren

Well, the Rozelle interchange has been leading the news since the roadway opened on Sunday. The morning peak has been chocker since Monday. I've been caught up and as you know, a week today, absolute disaster.

Anyway, it's a story for another day. There are a few issues and pinch points that look to be causing the problems here, many involving a loss of lanes On to the Anzac Bridge.

First, we see three lanes from Victoria Road become one of the Anzac Bridge. Big problem the tunnel under utilized until this morning when I needed to use it and then you couldn't swing a absolutely full.

Of course, then you got the City West Link that heads east and we've lost a lane there. It's down to one heading on to the Anzac Bridge that really actually, despite all the talk of Victoria Road all week, the City West Link seems to be the big problem.

And then there's the Crescent. Now I'm told the overpass they're coming from Annandale isn't that busy at the moment, but again, two lanes merging into one. So put simply, it's a miss.

It's a miss. And let's not forget the four odd billion dollars that were spent putting this spaghetti junction together. All of that was meant to be an investment in productivity.

But of course, if you've got motorists stuck in traffic longer than they would have been stuck in traffic prior to this being constructed, then you were doing nothing to boost productivity.

In fact, you're doing the opposite. So look, naturally, every man and his dog at a suggestion how we can fix all of this. We've heard about toll free days adding extra lanes, restoring lanes that have been taken away and all the rest of it.

They're all valid ideas. I'm not sure much is going to happen, but what would actually fix it? And from an international perspective, are there lessons that we can learn here and quickly turn the ship around?

Could it ever be fixed? Well, to find out, an expert, professor of transport at the University of Sydney, David Levinson, he's looked at roads and road networks for decades.

He's on the line. David, thank you for your time.

DL

David Levinson

Thank you.

Michael McLaren

Now, this is a massive problem, obviously, for Sydney at the moment. This, as I said, was meant to be a productivity enhancing game changer. Now, I note, I note this it isn't fully completed.

The whole WestConnex behemoth still has a little more to go with the Western Harbour Tunnel than the rest of it, and we're told by 2028 it'll be okay, but people can't wait until 2028.

Should we be surprised that it's been such a mess so early on?

DL

David Levinson

There's a fixed amount of capacity on the Anzac Bridge. And if you think of it as a funnel and you have a stem, which is the Anzac Bridge, and then you have all these roads above it, which are the cone feeding into the tunnel and you widen that cone, the number of people who can come out the other end is the same. So we're basically. Just stacking people in a different way than we were before.

Michael McLaren

I mean, all of this surely, though, I mean, you've been in this space for forever. I mean, all of these things surely are workshopped and war gamed for years and years before ink even goes on the paper, let alone the years of construction prior to the official ribbon cutting, which was only the other week.

Is it too naive to think that no one foresaw this?

DL

David Levinson

There were people who foresaw this, I'm sure, both within the organization and certainly outside of the organization. And this route has been on the map in some form or another for decades.

So you have an imperative to finish building the drawings. The map that you drew a long time ago. There's I mean, there's two points of view on this right on the morning you're feeding into this bottleneck.

And that doesn't help you much because you widen the road, they're constrained at the bridge.

In the afternoon, you've cleared all the constraints going outward and you're not going to have nearly as much congestion as you used to, because you have solved the bottlenecks that are in the outbound direction. So there are benefits to this traffic perspective.

Should they have foreseen this? Yes.

Is this the best use of resources? That's debatable.

I think there's another problem . Within the organization, they've lost a lot of technical capacity and they outsourced everything.

They outsource all of their design, consulting and construction and everything like that. Whereas 30 years ago, a lot more of that was done in-house. So I think you've got a managerial class as it doesn't really understand transport at a deep level the way that they used to when the organisation was dominated by engineers.

I'm not saying that's necessarily good or bad, although I'm an engineer, but I think that you have sort of a lost of a deep understanding of how traffic works within the organization.

Michael McLaren

Yeah, I mean, look, politically, at the end of the day, the politicians love cutting the ribbons and opening these big expensive projects and they tell us how much of our money they spent on it before, not reminding us that we're often told for the privilege after the event and all the rest of it.

But I note the opposition for whom this was really their baby for over a decade when they're in power, they've been pretty quiet about the traffic problems. I'm pretty sure they're worried that if they pop their head above the parapet and say, Look, the government has stuffed up the opening, the government will be pretty quick to turn around and say, well, hang on, we cut the ribbon effectively, but you did all the grunt work beforehand, so you can you can own this one.

Thanks very much. So from a political point of view, the voters don't know where to turn to vent their frustration. Again, there does seem to be and I'm not an engineer, I'm a novice.

But I look at this and as a user of this the last week or so, it seems to me there's the flaw in the design are these pinch points that I mentioned earlier.

Now, you know, is that the case? Do you think they've just got to get out there at midnight with the white paint and change the road markings and reopen lanes and do away with decades of planning?

DL

David Levinson

Well, I think there are tweaks that they will make as they understand how people actually use the system. There are things that they can do that are small and will benefit, but I don't think they're widening the Anzac Bridge.

So the capacity of the system is constrained you're basically exiting one line and just getting on to the next line sooner.

Are you really better off getting onto the next line sooner?

Now because that line is only going to go as fast as that line goes.

This is the fundamental problem here.

You're just moving people closer to the Anzac Bridge, but you're not getting them across the Anzac Bridge any sooner than they otherwise would have.

Michael McLaren

Look, I suppose if we put a really big perspective hat on here and try to look at this from a city wide town planning perspective, I mean really what this I think is highlighting, is it not, is that the greater Sydney vision?

And we've had, you know, the three cities policy and all the rest of it, but we've we've really got to try to start encouraging that because this this constant eastbound flow in the morning and then westbound tide in the afternoon when you add another million people every decade or whatever we're doing to the Greater Sydney Basin, I mean it is getting to the point where it doesn't matter what you build at the end, you're going to be snookered.

So you've got to try to get people working closer to where they live. And if that means in the morning they head west and in the afternoon they then go east.

You take some of the pressure off the existing infrastructure.

DL

David Levinson

Yeah. I mean, I think over the long term, A, that's part of the plan and B, it's necessary, right? We have to balance jobs and housing across the region in order to make better use of the infrastructure.

And we'd be shortening the total amount of travel. We can add people to the region and shorten the amount of travel if we had more jobs out west and we had more people living in the eastern part of the region.

Michael McLaren

I mean, just just from a geographic point of view, Sydney's a bit different to other cities around the world. You take London and Paris, these sort of places, you can come at them from the north, the south, the east and the west, whereas Sydney effectively on the east coast you've got the ocean.

And so everything seems to come from the north, particularly from the west and the south west, moving in one direction, effectively hits a dead end and then comes out in the afternoon again.

So geographically, we are a bit hampered, are we not, by just the nature of the topography?

DL

David Levinson

A little bit, but I mean, many cities in the world are hampered. Many cities are on, oceans: Chicago's on the Great Lakes. San Francisco's on a Bay, New York.

Many great cities are on water and are geographically constrained. And all great cities have congestion. I mean, you're not going to build your way out of it because if you were to add capacity, more people would decide to travel at that time.

It is not necessarily a bad thing to add capacity and we can discuss that, but you're not doing away with congestion as such by adding capacity or moving it around.

Michael McLaren

All right. Now, just finally, they've added a stack of capacity. We've for years complained in Sydney that governments don't build things well. They've built plenty. And here's one of the examples at this point.

Look, maybe this time next year it's a different story. Who knows? But at this point it's creating chaos and it's worse than it was prior to the opening. So something's not working.

If you were given the instruction, the magic wand, as it were, and they said, Alright, David, come on, tell us, how do we fix this and quickly or how do we make it better and quickly?

What would you advise?

Michael McLaren

I mean, what I would advise would get me moved from that position pretty quickly.

Michael McLaren

What is it? Tell me.

DL

David Levinson

Generalised road pricing. So the part of the problem that we have is that we're underpricing the roads people use. The toll roads are too expensive and the city streets are too inexpensive to drive on.

So we encourage more traffic on city streets then we should. And the toll roads are generally underutilized compared to the streets. And so we've got a mismatch of where traffic is.

And we have too many people travelling in the peak and not enough in the off peak because we're not charging people more to travel in the peak except, for the congestion that they suffer.

But we're not charging them for the congestion that they cause to everybody else. So we need some form of road pricing if we want to solve this problem. We'll eventually get there as we move towards, replacing the fuel tax with a distance based charge, for electric vehicles.

But we should be doing that sooner