• @Meuzzin
    17•8 months ago

    This shit angers me to no end. Where I live, they built this wonderful highway around the greater metro area. Said it’d be a toll road for 25 years until paid off. We’re on year 29 now, because they needed to “update” it.

    Then, you find out the tolls are managed by a for-profit company in Saudi Arabia…? The express lanes, that cause more traffic and wrecks than a simple exspansion of lanes, is ran buy a for-profit company, in a foreign country. It makes no sense, unless you’re a fan of unregulated capitalism, I guess.

    • Christian Kent
      1•8 months ago

      @Meuzzin @ajsadauskas There was the time the motorway tunnel under the river went broke — Brisbane’s CLEM7

      I like that they take the risk; so conceptually it’s a pass from me, but a partial failure when it’s a sweetheart deal.

      Rail infrastructure is funded by taxes, built by contractors, and the users have to pay each time they use it too. So I have not much sympathy for the precise fact of paying to use a road.

      In fact we should be removing lanes — not these, but stroads like Victoria Rd.

      • Christian Kent
        1•8 months ago

        @Meuzzin @ajsadauskas City West Link is a complete duplicate of the M4 East — in fact it was a failed prototype, using the M4’s original corridor, compromised by cost savings (INSTEAD of tapping that equity market, but anyway …)

        So instead of replacing Parramatta Road through the inner west in June 2000, we ended up with a second stroad! Brand new traffic lights in Leichhardt, recommended to drive into the city.

        Get rid of it! Close it at Hawthorne Canal.

        And rip 4 lanes off Parramatta Rd.

        • Christian Kent
          1•8 months ago

          @Meuzzin @ajsadauskas But instead — and I see why they’re afraid — Labor are throwing money at road users. Subsidising tolls with tax money, and doing it indirectly (with new paperwork).

          The final Liberal premier did a mini-poison-pill by promising not to close any lanes on Parramatta Road. “You have the choice of a free road”, great cynicism. You had the choice to remove induced demand, fool.

          At least his predecessor designed a transport agenda with non-stroad new roads and metro lines.