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Sydney's Third World road system is only going to get worse

Garry Linnell

The temperature gauge in the car says it's nudging 43 degrees. As if you needed confirmation. Outside, there's a shimmer rising from the baking bitumen. Inside, your bladder aches. It must be the size of a watermelon by now. And there's no relief in sight. You're in the middle of a conga line of motionless cars stretching 19 kilometres and the only thing to keep your mind off this situation is to fantasise about what you would like to do to the idiot who caused it.

An afternoon in the public stocks with several thousand victims hurling every piece of rotten fruit at him they can find? Too gentle. And besides, that means joining another damn queue.

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The future productivity and quality of life in Australia's big cities will hinge on the efficiency of our transport networks.

His face, name and IQ displayed on every electronic screen alongside the M1 where he caused this mayhem? Getting warmer, and perhaps closer, to the justice that should be meted out to someone who disrupted – and endangered – the lives of so many.

But before we get to that, how about we start by stripping him of his licence to drive a heavy vehicle. And how about the state government finally concede that its huge program of infrastructure projects, along with its open-arm embrace of property developers where everything except a pothole is allowed to be redeveloped, has now turned travelling on Sydney's roads into a game of chance?

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Every day brings with it not just the usual array of traffic incidents caused by bone-headed motorists, but a growing number of "accidents" involving trucks and other heavy vehicles. The carnage on the M1 this week, where a mobile crane and a large truck collided and then fused together in the resulting fireball, was just the latest in a long line of similar incidents. The previous day a milk truck spilt hundreds of litres of the white stuff across Pennant Hills Road. And let's not even mention those permanent basket cases, the M4 and the M5.

Just another week on Sydney's lamentable, Third World road system. Widespread disruption causing delayed appointments, cancelled jobs and hundreds, if not thousands, of lost work hours. Just another week of apologies to motorists and empty pleas for patience. And another week bereft of solutions.

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Funny, isn't it, how we go through the ritual of listening to the Business Council and other top-end-of-town types roll out their annual whinge about sickies being taken over the Australia Day long weekend, but we never hear a word from them on the daily cost to business of moving around this city. 

I've written before about the number of trucks that hurtle along what passes for our road system. Some truck drivers have complained that the real problem has been the back-breaking deadlines forced upon them by bosses and businesses too protective of their bottom line, which often includes a cheapskate approach to servicing and maintaining their vehicles.

Fair enough, too. No one disputes driving a large truck is a tough business. Who could muster the concentration or judgment required for an all-day journey, let alone an hour of listening to country music? But you also don't need a degree in quantum physics to know that a large vehicle in this city overtaking a smaller car creates a bend in the space-time continuum and only bad things can happen as a result.

In many areas Sydney already has some of the narrowest traffic lanes of any major city in the country, courtesy of decades of poor planning and federal and state government bungling and ineptitude.

Yet the speed limit for trucks has not been lowered, nor has the government been willing to consider congestion-busting moves that might ease the pain. Hasn't it reached the point where we should consider trucks of a certain tonnage travelling on suburban streets only between 7pm and 7am? Should we further lower speed limits for large vehicles? No, far simpler to transform Australia Day into a five-day double-demerit blitz on drivers rather than confronting the stuff that really might make our roads safer.

So we are left with this current mess and the hollow promises that all this feverish activity building new tunnels and transport systems will one day ease the snarling nature of our bumper-to-bumper lives. Just do the maths. Another million people added to the city in the next decade. Congestion will be the norm.

And a 19-kilometre traffic jam snaking its way out of the city in stinking heat because of one accident involving a truck and a crane is the sort of Third World problem we may also have to get used to.

Time to get back to those pelvic floor exercises and filling the boot with bottled water and canned food. Strap yourself in. We're in for a long journey.

Garry Linnell is co-presenter of The Breakfast Show on Talking Lifestyle

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