Thursday 3 October 2013

Never the twain did meet.

The Elizabeth Street, Wentworth Avenue, College Street arterial is one of the most important and irreplaceable distributors in Sydney. It receives traffic alternately from Chalmers Street and from Broadway, via Pitt Street and Eddy Avenue, and distributes the traffic to Surry Hills west of Crown, Oxford Street, William Street, Macquarie Street and the Cahill Expressway. The traffic flow from Broadway is also tangental to the CBD and has only a small impact on current bus movements which go from Broadway to Rawson Place in less than a minute (the red line). The only bus routes affected by the east-west traffic movements are the "Railway Square" bus routes (the purple line). These are bus routes from the Eastern Suburbs, understandably, and the mainly bendy bus routes from Chatswood and the Pacific Highway that are inexplicably doglegged into Elizabeth Street via Park Street. I mentioned these previously and will deal with them in more detail in later posts.
The Pitt Street, Eddy Avenue tangental
What O'Farrell will be doing to the Broadway bus services is identical to what he will be doing to the Chalmers Street bus services. Only the street names in the previous post need to be changed.

Ve vill dramatically increase traffic flows in Pitt Street, reduce the number of lanes and force buses to negotiate through this traffic.

As argued before, Elizabeth Street and Macquarie Street will be the only access to the CBD north of Park Street, but there is an additional factor. Traffic from south of McEvoy Street has a choice of travelling north along Botany Road or Elizabeth Street. Elizabeth Street would be the preferred route for traffic heading to the Eastern Suburbs, but, with Chalmers Street reduced to one lane, the traffic would shift to Botany Road and thence Pitt Street and Eddy Avenue.

There are currently no bus stops in the critical section section of Pitt Street between Broadway and Eddy Avenue. Bus services that are forcibly terminated will dump most of their passengers in Pitt Street. All Parramatta Road and City Road bus services will be forced to negotiate through this section of Pitt Street whether they are terminated or enlisted to crush the Elizabeth Street bus services.

We will use historic vehicle per hour data to estimate the number of hours a day that Broadway will be gridlocked in another post. The RTA has current data and the expertise to do this accurately.

Ve vont just terminate bus routes ve vill double-cross them and degrade them

Buses that are terminated (blue line) dump north-bound and Central-bound passengers in Pitt Street then cross the tram tracks (yellow lines) and stop in Rawson Place to drop off the final passengers bound for Randwick. There will be little provision for buses to wait for their scheduled departure, then they cross the tram tracks again. Then, as an added twist, they cross their in-bound path.

Since the first settlement at Sydney Cove trams and buses have travelled along George Street to Parramatta Road while trams and buses to the Eastern Suburbs have travelled along Elizabeth Street. The two routes have never crossed. When O'Farrell sets out to humiliate people from the western suburbs he really rubs it in.

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