Forced to sell her home to make way for the WestConnex project, St Peters resident Shelley Roberts says she has little hope of being able to stay in the area.
The construction of a WestConnex interchange adjacent to Sydney Park and still-evolving plans to increase capacity on existing roads are stoking fears that Alexandria, an apartment hotspot, will soon become unliveable, despite government assurances to the contrary.
A new Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) proposal to make some roads in Alexandria and Waterloo clearways is intended to ease the congestion that WestConnex is expected to cause.
According to the proposal, which was announced in December, the Alexandria to Moore Park Connectivity Upgrade will also provide unspecified “better facilities and connectivity for pedestrians and cyclists between Sydney Park and Moore Park”.
A man walks inside the fenced off area on the Euston Road side of Sydney Park. Photo: Kate Geraghty
Residents are now anxiously awaiting a report from the federal auditor-general, expected to be released on Tuesday, which will examine the Federal Government’s decision to commit $3.5 billion in funding to WestConnex.
Locals say the WestConnex development, coupled with the RMS plan, call into question Alexandria’s future as a high-density, pedestrian-friendly residential suburb.
“It isn’t going to make the area liveable at all,” says Nathan English, co-convenor of the public-transport advocacy group EcoTransit Sydney.
“It’s going to be a disaster at street level.”
The WestConnex interchange at St. Peters and the New M5 local road upgrades, also part of WestConnex, are projected to create an additional 60,000 vehicle movements per day along Euston Road in Alexandria as motorists proceed from the inner west to the eastern suburbs.
To better deal with the traffic, WestConnex is moving ahead with a plan to widen a one-kilometre stretch of Euston Road to six lanes between Campbell Street on Alexandria’s southern border and Maddox Street in its heart.
Beyond this point, Euston Road will revert to four lanes but become a clearway, according the the RMS proposal. The clearway will continue north-east along the road into Waterloo.
According to English, the continued development of apartment blocks in Alexandria and the government’s plans to use Euston Road as a southern CBD bypass route are incompatible.
“The population in the area is skyrocketing,” he says. “We’ll end up with high-rise profit boxes surrounded by very busy streets and no way to reclaim them.”
Ben Aveling, co-convenor of the Alexandria Residents’ Action Group, says the changes to Euston Road will worsen quality life for Alexandria’s residents without improving traffic flow.
“The road already ought to be able to carry more cars than it does,” he says, “but it doesn’t, because there’s nowhere for those cars to go [after Alexandria]. Widening bits of the route won’t help: it will just mean you have more cars sitting in the same traffic jam.”
Adds Aveling: “One expression that I’ve used is ‘Bigger bottle, same neck.'”
But a spokesperson for the Sydney Motorway Corporation (SMC), which is constructing WestConnex, says the ongoing development of roads infrastructure around Alexandria will be a net positive for residents.
“[The St Peters Interchange plan] has provided the catalyst for the remediation of the unsightly and highly contaminated Alexandria Landfill site, which will be transformed to enable community use for the first time in decades,” the spokesperson told Domain.
“As well as removing the old landfill site from the local community, development of the St Peters Interchange will result in an additional 8.5 hectares of open green space. On completion of the M4-M5 Link, Sydney Park will be linked directly to this green space via a new land bridge over Campbell Road.”
According to the SMC, the suite of measures currently being proposed will future-proof the neighbourhood for residents, not doom it.
“Without WestConnex and the local road upgrades, local roads will be unable to accommodate the future traffic demands. We’re planning for the future to ensure the best result for the local community.”
English expects further road widening in Alexandria and Waterloo to follow and says additional land along the Euston Road corridor has already been reserved by government. Eventually, he says, the entirety of Euston Road, from Sydney Park to Moore Park, could become a six-lane clearway like Parramatta Road.
It’s an idea that has been floated by state governments several times in recent decades. And, with such a large stretch of Euston Road already confirmed for widening, further capacity increases in the years ahead seem like a foregone conclusion.
The report to be released by the federal auditor-general on Tuesday is considered important because a previous report by the NSW auditor general, released in late 2014, concluded: “It was not able to form a view on whether the project is a worthwhile and prudent investment … for the NSW government.”
If the new report declares WestConnex to be bad value, residents may be emboldened to fight the proposed changes.