Driving on the Pacific Highway from Merewether to Marks Point, you meet 33 sets of traffic lights. When traffic is thick, the trip takes half an hour at an average speed of 32kmh.
And your car or ute is one of thousands per hour that pummel Charlestown, Gateshead and Belmont with noise. The traffic density obstructs crossing the highway on foot and deters people from loitering near it.
But that drive could take nine minutes at an average of 90-100kmh, involve no traffic lights and affect almost no one's home or business. It could if the state government cared enough about Newcastle to revive a plan for a high-capacity road east of of the highway. Almost all the land for that road is still there.
But don't expect to see it in the forthcoming Hunter region transportation plan from Transport for NSW. If the draft released in 2022 is anything to go by, this will be a trivial document - a brochure full of waffle, pretty photographs, lots of talk about bicycles and none about road planning.
The cover of the draft plan showed people on bikes on Nobbys breakwater. Since the breakwater doesn't go anywhere, it depicted not transportation but recreation. How unserious can a government transport agency get?
The officials who drew the route for a big, fast road from Merewether to Marks Point in the 1940s were serious, working under instructions from a Labor government that insisted on long-term planning. Their road was supposed to be part of the link to Sydney, what has become the Pacific Motorway. When the interurban route was shifted to the west of Lake Macquarie, the plan for the road on the eastern side fell into abeyance.
Nonetheless, the corridor reservation survived under the name "East Charlestown Bypass" until 2006, when another Labor government, with far less vision, abandoned it. The land was rezoned. Greater Newcastle has suffered from many reckless decisions to abandon precious transportation corridors, but that one was probably the worst.
Yet it's not too late to recover the corridor of the East Charlestown Bypass. Despite rezoning, very little has been built on.
The main obstruction is a new housing development on the corridor where it passes Whitebridge shops. The government should promptly issue resumption notices on the homes and switch zoning for the whole corridor back to "road reservation".
We can all imagine why it won't want to. First, nimbies would make a lot of noise, as nimbies always do. People with plenty of nearby trees wouldn't want to lose some for the benefit of everyone else.
And no NSW government has much interest in spending heavily on Newcastle or even promising to do so. Every politician knows that Newcastle has an almost unlimited tolerance for neglect. It doesn't complain.
But this road issue on the eastern side of the lake is big and unavoidable. As our population grows and densifies, will north-south movement forever be concentrated on an increasingly congested arterial road that ruins 16 kilometres of local amenity? Or will the state solve the problem by building the fast, six-lane motorway-standard replacement whose land is almost all ready to go?
Hardly any of the East Charlestown Bypass route is next to houses, and in those places it could be given noise barriers and hidden behind trees.
It departs the Pacific Highway west of the intersection with Scenic Drive then runs alongside Kahibah. In Whitebridge, it's next to the Fernleigh Track, which could be moved east a little to preserve its beauty.
At Bennetts Green, the route meets the Newcastle Inner City Bypass, which was conceived as part of the same, thoughtful scheme. Then it must cross the Belmont Wetlands State Park, which it can do on a viaduct, with little disturbance to nature below. It rejoins the Pacific Highway at the intersection with Marks Point Road.
So the East Charlestown Bypass bypasses a lot more than Charlestown. I have previously suggested a new name for it, 'East Lake Motorway' (because we should also be planning for a West Lake Motorway from Wallsend to Teralba, Fassifern and Dora Creek).
The East Charlestown Bypass would have probably five interchanges, for: 1, Kahibah; 2, Whitebridge and Dudley; 3, Gateshead, Windale and Bennetts Green; 4, Redhead and Jewells; and, 5, Belmont. Traffic to and from all those places would be diverted from the Pacific Highway and local sub-arterial roads. So would through-traffic between inner Newcastle and the Swansea area and beyond. The Pacific Highway wouldn't become quiet, but it would be much less busy than it is now. And we would be able to get around more easily.
An important result would be promoting medium-density housing along the route. When a locality has better connections, demand for living there rises.
If you improve one part of a road network, you put more pressure on other parts of it. So we could expect more traffic into and through Newcastle city centre. But we will eventually need a solution for the problem of a major route crossing Parry and Hunter streets. It probably needs a tunnel. And the northern end of the East Charlestown Bypass could be arranged to distribute traffic on to Northcott Drive, whose corridor is wide enough for more lanes.
Meeting the southern end, the Pacific Highway down to Lake Entrance needs to become a motorway, which could be designed to ease foot access between Blacksmiths and Pelican. The original plan took the route into central Swansea, as now, but a later version avoided that problem with a big bridge over Lake Entrance and Black Neds Bay.
Motorways aren't cheap, especially when they need big bridges. But we are so badly neglected that we should not hesitate to demand to have this road. Anyway, mere planning for it would be cheap, and that's what should happen immediately.
Restore the reservation.
