Suburban squeeze puts pressure on roads

Many years ago, a resident of the state’s South West who regularly drove to Perth to drop off and pick up their fly-in, fly-out spouse complained to me about the creep of suburbia along the route and its effect on their driving experience.

The issue was the stretch of road that winds through Bunbury and past Australind, that gap between Forrest Highway’s southern terminus and the northern end of the Bussell Highway.

For those of us who transit this stop-and-start, slow-down, speed-up section of road less frequently, it is somewhere between an annoying interruption of an otherwise seamless drive or, for the more cynical, a deliberately conceived minefield of speed traps for the unwary.

For regular drivers, it is an inefficient burden on their time, vehicle and, unfortunately all too often, their demerit points.

Since being made aware of the issue I have only seen it get worse.

Of course, the Bunbury Outer Ring Road is well under way and is seen a genuine solution to this problem (we can only hope).

I am extremely cynical about this.

Two things have been brought to my attention which tell me that, somehow, despite the best intention of planners, the interruptions to a straight drive will endure.

Firstly, let’s cast our eye south of Bunbury where the state government has been busy widening the road to Busselton and hopefully soon it will have removed the single lanes that choked traffic just after Capel to complete a dual-carriageway connection.

Yet, just as roadworks seem certain to be completed, Main Roads has relented to community pressure to introduce an 80-kilometresan-hour speed zone at Capel.

The reason is fair enough, you would think.

Accidents have become a significant issue.

However, it is the easy answer to change a speed limit rather than dealing with the implications of a growing population next to a busier traffic conduit.

Traffic has sped past Capel at 110km/hour for some time.

In fact, I recall substantial roadworks not long ago that removed a previous pinch point there by providing extra lanes and much better lighting.

So here we are, back to the future.

Which brings me to the second thing that makes me question how long Bunbury’s bypass will remain uninterrupted.

The outer ring road makes perfect sense unless road planners get gazumped by urban planners and developers.

Then the vision of uninterrupted flow around the city of Bunbury may be chiselled away to represent more of what we already have.

And there are the makings of that.

For instance, the outer ring road already only just skirts industrial land, which will bring urban development closer and the demand for more highway access points.

Then there is the proposed City of Wanju, a planned population of 50,000 people set on 1,245 hectares of farmland east of Bunbury in the Shire of Dardanup.

The Wanju district structure plan is nestled south of the Collie River bounded on the east by the outer ring road, to the west by the existing Forrest Highway where it reaches Bunbury and to the south by the end of the South West Highway.

South of that, extending across both sides of the outer ring road as it swings west towards the coast, is the Waterloo industrial district structure plan and, less impactfully, the Picton industrial park’s planned southern precinct, which just has one touch point on the bypass.

Naturally, you would expect the ring road to emulate a similar piece of infrastructure you would find in Perth, such as the Roe Highway.

Maybe it will.

To be fair, I have recently visited Albany and the new ring road being put in place to access the harbour already has a major bridge over the Albany Highway which, one day, will ultimately serve the purpose for which it has been constructed.

That is what is needed at Bunbury and the future City of Wanju.

But bridges and ancillary construction are expensive, especially long before the population has arrived to support them economically.

From a state government’s point of view, I imagine, there is not that much concern regarding the journeys of holiday makers on an Easter long weekend.

I am betting that, when I write my last column for Business News some time in the hopefully very distant future, I will hark back to this moment and empathise with the growing population of the South West whose visits to Perth are such a slog in their self-drive electric-powered people-movers.