http://www.smh.com.au/national/labyrinth-threatens-to-eat-city-20100115-mcgg.html
This in reality could apply to any major city because traffic congestion from the suburbs to the inner city precincts are problems common across the world.
Regardless of how well a public transport system operates with co-operation between rail and bus, the number of motor vehicles on that roads produces congestion that every one of us experience.
Any city expressway system is only ever as good as are the 'exit' designs whereby traffic moving off the throughway can easily and speedily transverse the suburban road network.
Well-Being Australia chairman, Mark Tronson, sees a similar problem in a regional area. He is a frequent traveller from Tweed Heads along the Gold Coast Freeway to Brisbane where this issue is identified every day when 'exit' traffic is seen banked up all the way back to the freeway itself.
He gives another example. A new 'exit' freeway plan for Tweed Heads South major shopping and light industrial area has all three major arterial roads converging, plus the 'exiting' freeway traffic. It will be grid lock 'gone mad'.
This 'exit' drama is typical in major cities, says M V Tronson, and without doubt, there are millions upon millions of people who need to live in or very near to cities all around the world.
But there is another side to this. How many children's playgrounds and parks and people's homes have been required to string out monolith freeway systems? For every home that is taken, inner city schools lose students and thereby teachers. Christian churches too have had to reflect on how such changes of infrastructure might determine their ministry emphasis.
Where is the equilibrium between the needs of inner city residents, who by and large pay large sums of money to live close to the city and all that a city provides, to those who live in the sprawling suburbs but need to travel into the city? And what of commerce and industry whose needs are just as diversified?
City planners take broad views to contend with all these competing forces. They have the unenviable task of coming up with proposals to solve these types of perennial issues; proposals that the politicians can sell to the public who elect them to office.
In Sydney, according to Andrew West, the average speed in the morning peak hour on seven major roads - including all but one of Sydney's motorways - has fallen, from 34 kilometres per hour in 2003 to 30 kilometres per hour in 2008.
Dr Zeibots, a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney, states "Quite clearly, motorway building has not reduced congestion otherwise speeds would have improved.''
This has been the trend in every major city in the world where traffic chaos is the order of the day. There may come a time when all private traffic will be prohibited from the inner city between set hours, as is being trialled in other large cities such as London. The question (as is also being asked in London at present) will be whether public transport could cope.
Mega Churches consisting of five to twenty five thousand people are likewise concerned over such issues as many cities around the world today have seven day shopping and this church traffic too needs to compete.
