<<A fully-laden double fuel tanker overturned in a short, straight, three-laned section of the highway between Katoomba and Medlow Bath in the early hours of Sunday, May 12.
The giant rig owned by Orange-based Ron Finemores Transport was being driven west when it veered onto the road shoulder and overturned down an embankment, coming to rest with the twin tankers upside down.
An ambulance spokesman said the driver, a 34-year-old Millthorpe man, was able to free himself from his wrecked cabin and clambered back to the roadway where one of the first on the scene was an off-duty paramedic. He was taken to Katoomba Hospital and treated for minor facial injuries.
Driver Fatigue is suspected as a possible cause of the smash.>>
[Ed: So are Finemore’s drivers paid by the hour or by completed trip – where the more trips and the faster they hurtle along, the cheaper it is for the trucking corporation? Are there any unions left to represent truck drivers’ occupational health and safety on The Road as a Workplace?
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On The Road as a Workplace, the New South Wales Government provides no truck rest stop along the entire length of the Great Western Highway between Orange and Sydney (255 km) in either direction to properly cater for heavy vehicle driver fatigue.
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The token parking bay at Faulconbridge westbound through the Blue Mountains is a substandard joke, with the only facilities being two rubbish bins. The westbound shoulder at Mount Victoria opposite the Caltex Service Station for trucker cabin sleeping is a disgraceful defacto emergency stopover and only inflicts noise pollution to nearby locals 24/7.
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Overpaid NSW Transport urban bureaucrats Peter Duncan, Les Wielinga, Roads Minister Duncan Gay, and millionnaire magnate Ron Finemore need to do a few nights truck cabin kip there (this time of year) and then directly turn up for work the next day. At the same time, these same NSW Government urban bureaucrats justify billions to widen the highway to four lanes to facilitate more corporate truck freight – as if an urban fatigue free route.
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Ron Finemore Transport is one of the corporate trucking lobbyists pushing for more and bigger trucks along the Great Western Highway. In 2012 the company opened a new $9 million facility in Orange along the highway to house its 120 B-Double truck drivers and fleet of 50 B-Doubles.
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Selfish trucking magnates like Finemore divert New South Wales Government from investing in freight rail services and infrastructure. They perpetuate the dangerous B-Double Menace that is increasingly killing and maiming ordinary users of our regional highways and a deadly social problem avoided by governments around Australia.]
<<A woman has died after a crash between a truck and car today (Thursday) at Luddenham in Sydney’s west, police say. Police and other emergency services attended the collision on The Northern Road, near Littlefields Rd, about 10am. A brief will be prepared for the Coroner.
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Meanwhile, a 44-year-old man has been injured after a multiple-vehicle crash in Sydney’s west this morning. About 5:05am, two semi-trailers, A Toyota Hilux utility and a Ford sedan at the intersection of the Great Western Highway and Doonside Rd at Arndell Park. Emergency services personnel took about 30 minutes to remove the utility driver from the vehicle. He is being treated in Westmead Hospital for chest and arm injuries.>>
<<A B-Double truck travelling in lane three on the M4 Motorway near St Clair (Sydney’s west) has changed lanes and moved into the path of a utility this morning (Sunday).
The B-Double struck the car and the car then flipped over and ended on its roof, killing the car driver. The driver of the B-Double truck failed to stop and continued travelling west along the M4.
[Ed: … I own the road but I saw nuuthing!]
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<<Meanwhile, a 32-year-old male pedestrian has suffered a serious leg fracture when he was struck by a truck in another hit-and-run near Newcastle last night (Saturday).
Police say the man was walking north in the breakdown lane of the Pacific Highway at Tomago, where three lanes merge into two, when he was hit by a truck at a point past the northern end of Hexham Bridge about 6:45pm. The man was thrown on to the highway’s grass shoulder, while the truck did not stop!
The injured man managed to crawl back to the edge of the road and hail a passing motorist for help, police say. He was treated at the scene and taken to Newcastle’s John Hunter Hospital suffering a serious lower leg fracture. The Newcastle Crash Investigation Unit is looking into the crash and making attempts to track down the truck involved.>>
[Ed: … I own the road but I saw nuuthing!]
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May 2013: B-Double hangs off Melbourne’s Bolte Bridge
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B-Doubles Out of Control
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<<The driver plunged from the cabin of his vehicle after a road crash left the truck’s cabin dangling off Melbourne’s Bolte Bridge just after 6.30am today (17th May, 2013).
There is traffic chaos on a Melbourne freeway where a truck has crashed and been left dangling precariously over the side. The truck driver was taken to Royal Melbourne Hospital and is in a critical condition. The driver of the other car was also taken to hospital in an unknown condition.
The incident has caused chaos on the Tullamarine Freeway, which is now closed to inbound traffic at Flemington Road. City-bound traffic on the Tullamarine Freeway remains at a standstill.
The road will likely be closed until later today and transport authority VicRoads has advised motorists to avoid the heavily-congested area. Crews will work to remove the truck, which is hanging halfway over the bridge, and assess damage to the road before it is reopened to motorists.>>
<<A woman has died after a crash between a truck and car today (Thursday) at Luddenham in Sydney’s west, police say. Police and other emergency services attended the collision on The Northern Road, near Littlefields Rd, about 10am. A brief will be prepared for the Coroner.
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Meanwhile, a 44-year-old man has been injured after a multiple-vehicle crash in Sydney’s west this morning.
About 5:05am, two semi-trailers, A Toyota Hilux utility and a Ford sedan at the intersection of the Great Western Highway and Doonside Rd at Arndell Park.
Emergency services personnel took about 30 minutes to remove the utility driver from the vehicle. He is being treated in Westmead Hospital for chest and arm injuries. No one else was injured, police say.>>
<<A truck driver had a lucky escape after his semi-trailer caught fire in Victoria’s north. The truck carrying carpet was travelling on the Hume Highway near Wallan when the blaze began at 2pm. It is understood the driver fled the cabin of the truck as soon as he noticed the flames.
Up to 13 fire crews have been on scene battling the big blaze for hours. Police will investigate the cause of the fire as soon as it has been brought under control.
<<A driver escaped injury after a truck loaded with plastics exploded on a highway south-west of Sydney early this morning.
A truck loaded with wheelie bins has been engulfed in fire on a highway south-west of Sydney. The truck caught fire just (around midnight) today on the Hume Highway, south of Berrima.
A spokesperson for the NSW Rural Fire Service told ninemsn the trailer was filled with 800 domestic garbage bins. Molten plastic spread across the southbound lanes of the highway.
It took six fire trucks to extinguish the blaze which caused “extensive” damage to the trailer.>>
Apr 2013: Young man killed in horror head-on with B-Double
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Nothing Left
Pacific Highway near Ulmarra
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<<Police confirmed a man aged in his 20s died after the southbound Mazda 929 he was driving was involved in a head-on with a B-Double truck. The crash happened 3km north of the town about 3.15am.
Witnesses told police after the initial impact the truck swerved off the highway, rolled onto its side into a paddock and burst into flames. Firefighters who battled the blaze said the driver had a lucky escape. Fire crews said they were met by an inferno when they arrived on scene with flames rising as high as 10 to 20 metres above the wreckage.
The accident happened on a notorious Pacific Highway section…>>
Apr 2013: Speeding B-Double crashes and cattle killed, others shot
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B-Double Cattle Truck crash kills livestock, injured cattle are shot
Photo by Moree Champion
<<There was yet another truck roll on the Garah/Mungindi Road.
Dozens of cattle have been killed in a B-Double accident in north-west NSW. The truck rolled on a bend on the outskirts of Garah near Moree just after seven this morning.
Moree Plains Council ranger Jock Jones says locals are working together to save what cattle they can, and round up those that got away.
“We’ve used grinders to open the tray up. We’ve got a front end loader that’s pulling the truck apart,” he said. “It’s a hideous job now. Pulling them out is very sad. I’ve had to shoot a lot but we are saving a lot. “Most of them have got out and run off.”
There were about 60 cattle on board. It’s thought the cattle had come from Longreach in Queensland.
The 46-year-old driver of the truck was thrown clear on impact. He was treated by paramedics for facial injuries and cuts to his arms, back and legs. He was taken to Moree hospital in a stable condition.>>
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Ed: Previously on the same stretch of road: ‘Sheep killed in truck rollover near Garah’, 22nd February 2010…<<Dozens of sheep died and others were put down after a B-Double truck rolled over near Garah yesterday (Sunday).>>
Truck Crash at the corner of Roger St and Old Pittwater Rd Brookvale, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches
[Photo by Cameron Mitch, The Sunday Telegraph]
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<<Two people have escaped with minor injuries after the truck they were travelling in rolled over and caught on fire in Sydney’s north. The semi-trailer truck, which was carrying sand, rolled over about 8am on Old Pittwater Road in Brookvale, Fire and Rescue NSW said on Saturday.
“Two people escaped from the truck’s cabin before it caught fire,” Superintendent Tom Cooper told AAP. “The fire caused one of the truck’s 400 litre tanks of diesel to rupture and the diesel spilled into a storm water drain.”
Mar 2013: Two killed after B-Double and car collide head-on
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No chance at Ki Ki, South Australia
Picture: First On Scene Media Source: adelaidenow
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<<..In a shocking start to the Easter holidays, two people, both aged 22, believed to be Asian nationals living in Adelaide, died after the rental car they were driving crossed to the wrong side of the road and slammed into a B-Double truck on the Dukes Highway near Ki Ki (South Australia), just before 3am.
..Royal Automobile Association public affairs general manager Penny Gale said this stretch of highway accounted for a third of all the state’s road fatalities.
..Major Crash Investigation Section officer-in-charge Detective Inspector Peter Duance said it was a “tragedy” and he warned of the dangers of fatigue when driving in the early hours of the morning. “Sometimes, it’s a good idea to travel in the early hours because there is less traffic on the road but people need to remember to take appropriate rest breaks and share the driving if possible,” he said yesterday.
The deaths take the state’s road toll to 31 compared with 25 this time last year.
Mar 2013: B-Double carrying fertiliser rollover near Hummocks, SA
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<<Nobody was injured when a B-Double carrying fertiliser rolled onto its side on the Copper Coast Highway last Tuesday, March 19. Police were called to the accident about 2pm and put traffic restrictions in place which lasted until the scene was cleared six hours later. The crash happened just south of the Hummocks.
Mar 2013: “wobbling trailer” or Speed causes B-Double Rollover?
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B-Double rollover on the Cunningham Hwy at Maryvale
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<<The B-Double rollover on the Cunningham Hwy at Maryvale (north east of Warwick, south-eastern Queensland) on Saturday morning. One lane of the Cunningham Hwy was blocked at Maryvale from 6am Saturday until mid-afternoon after a B-Double rolled over. The truck was carrying general freight, including small motors and bags of grain.
A Warwick police spokesman said it was believed the rear trailer started to wobble which resulted in the whole vehicle turning over on one lane of the highway…Police said there was extensive damage to the prime mover.
There was also a single vehicle rollover at Pyramid’s Rd, Stanthorpe, at 12.45pm Saturday. No one was injured.
<<Motorists are experiencing extensive peak hour delays following a truck fire in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel. The fire started in the truck’s battery compartment, but the cause is still to be determined.
Traffic is banked up at both ends of the tunnel after a freightliner in the southbound lane caught on fire just after 4pm on Wednesday, activating a fire alarm and causing the closure of the tunnel.
A Transport Management Centre spokeswoman says motorists in the area are being diverted onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but there are extensive delays for northbound and southbound traffic. Emergency services are on site, and there is no forecast for when the tunnel will reopen.>>
A crash on the M4 freeway closed both lanes of traffic
[Source: Picture by Gregg Porteous, The Daily Telegraph]
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<<A multi-vehicle pile up on the M4 has closed the motorway in both directions. At least five vehicles, including two trucks collided near the intersection with Silverwater Rd about 1.15pm. …The accident left one ute on its roof, while two trucks hit the concrete median barrier pushing sections into the path of oncoming traffic.
Meanwhile, Sydney’s traffic woes have worsened with a broken down truck closing down the westbound tunnel of the M5 East. The tunnel was shut shortly after 2pm, with tow trucks enroute to clear the vehicle. But to make matters worse the usual detour route around the tunnel is also shut in both directions after a truck brought down powerlines on Stoney Creek Rd near the intersection of Mimosa St, Bexley.
.Truck on Fire on Hume Highway, near Yerrinbool
Photo by Petrina Price
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<<There are major delays for motorists on the Hume Hwy near Yerrinbool after a truck burst into flames this morning… just after 9.40am near Remembrance Drive.One of two southbound lanes is closed and traffic is queued for about 4.5km. Motorists are advised to avoid the area if possible.>>
Fire erupted in the trailers of the two trucks after they crashed on the Hume Highway near Yass
[Photo by ABC News]
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<<Northbound lanes of the Hume Highway north of Canberra remain closed after a fiery crash between two trucks. Fire erupted in the trailers of the vehicles after they collided about 10 kilometres from Yass just after 4:00am.
One of the truck drivers aged in his 50s suffered minor injuries and was taken to hospital. Firefighters had difficulty extinguishing a blaze in the paper cargo of one of the trucks.>>
Mar 2009: B-Double drags pedestrian 100 metres in hit-run
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Police gather evidence after a pedestrian was killed in a hit-run in Reservoir (Melbourne)
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<<Police say a female pedestrian was dragged 100 metres down the road in a fatal hit-and-run at Reservoir, in Melbourne’s north.
Police are questioning a 45-year-old man about the woman’s death, at the intersection of High Street and Broadhurst Avenue, about 10:30pm yesterday. The man was arrested at Epping early this morning.
Police say the B-Double prime mover and trailer stopped briefly after the collision, then took off. Sergeant Brendan Butland says the woman died at the scene.
“What’s occurred is tragic,” he said. “A lady was obviously standing on the street corner when the truck’s turned left. She’s been struck by the truck and has been dragged a hundred metres or so down the road, and it’s just tragic.”
McColl’s Milk Tanker slams at speed into a Parramatta Road cafe on the corner of Croydon Road, Croydon
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We didn’t have to wait long. Close to midnight last night, an out-of-control fully-laden milk tanker heading into Sydney along Parramatta Road, crossed over the centre concrete medium stip and slammed into a cafe, where residents were sleeping above. The prime mover then caught fire as it was wedged inside the cafe.
Milk Truck approach on eastbound side of Parramatta Road toward the Croydon Road intersection. Looking east along Parramatta Road toward the Croydon Road cafe (circled).More lanes and more trucks are making our highways more dangerous.
[Image construct via Google Maps, before the crash]
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The driver was probably on a linehaul service from Central West New South Wales delivering a milk load to Parmalat’s manufacturing plant at Lidcombe. The driver died on impact. Did he fall asleep like the Finemore’s driver driving through Medlow Bath around midnight on Sunday 12 May? (see lead post above).
It is yet another serious truck crash along the Great Western Highway corridor involving a trucking company based in Orange. In this case, McColl’s Milk Transport operates out of Orange at 8 Barret Street.
Did the 63 year old driver have a heart attack or stroke? How fit are these truck drivers? How often are they medically tested to operate such killing machines on our highways?
The RTA-come-RMS lets anyone get a truck licence these days. It Heavy Vehicle Competency Based Assessment programme is a joke.
The out of control truck hurtling on the wrong side of a six-laned Parramatta Road could have caused a head-on collision and killed many others, including the owners of the cafe. As it was, the main Sydney arterial Parramatta Road was closed in both directions for hours causing major delays during the busy Friday morning peak.
A year ago, a McColl’s B-Double milk truck collided with a Countrylink bus along on the Gwyder Highway halfway between Grafton and Glen Innes. It was about 3:30 pm, also on a Friday, on 10th February 2012. The Countrylink bus driver was killed and his passengers received minor injuries..
B-Double McColl’s milk truck over the double lines kills Countrylink bus driver on the Gwyder Highway in February 2012.
[Source: Photo by Debrah Novak, The Daily Examiner, from article ‘Fatal crash on Gwydir’, 20120210, Coffs Coast Advocate, ^http://www.coffscoastadvocate.com.au/news/fatal-bus-and-truck-accident/1267856/]
Sad Sight: Blue Mountains resident Aanya Mary devastated by the senseless slaughter of Bullaburra’s Angophora Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia.But to road engineers with Sydney’s RTA-come-RMS: “..it was just the easy and efficient option” ..in order that more B-Doubles get line-of-sight through Bullaburra as they nudge 90kph to keep their job
[Source: ‘Centuries-old tree makes way for highway upgrade’, 20130410, by Shane Desiatnik, Blue Mountains Gazette, p.13,
^http://www.bluemountainsgazette.com.au/story/1419083/bullaburra-tree-makes-way-for-highway-widening/] ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’
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Two generations after the 1960s grassroots protests against corporate environmental destruction and corrupted government bullying justification of ‘progress’, nothing has changed.
They took all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum” (Joni Mitchell, 1970), yet forty years hence we’re still killing 300 year old native trees for a ‘paved paradise.’
Back in September 2008, a communiqué released by the RTA-come-RMS confirmed that this heritage listed red gum (photo) alongside the highway at Bullaburra was to be killed to widen the highway. It didn’t give a reason to the community, but in its Review of Environmental Effectsjustified the tree’s demise by requiring line of sight for more trucks so they can hurtle through Bullaburra at a new increased speed of 80kph, but nudging 90.
The implication was to not just widen the existing highway and make it safer, but to carve a trucking expressway through as though no Bullaburra community existed; just like they did to neighbouring Lawson and Wentworth Falls, and the other now divided highway towns and villages along the Great Western Highway. And the lessons from the even wider and faster M4 motorway down the hill is that the outcomes have not made the journey safer. Statistically, faster and bugger trucks have made the M4 motorway and the already widened sections of the Great Western Highway, even more dangerous.
Killing Bullaburra’s Tree was wrong like an invading army shooting surrendering locals because it is inconvenient to imprison them. To the RTA-come-RMS, decimating local amenity is but collateral damage. Any wonder propaganda pamphlets were not dropped over the village in the weeks leading up to the carnage like the US did in the Vietnam War.
Widening the highway is the wrong encouragement for an efficient NSW freight system and won’t address road safety. The widening is destroying local heritage and community values. It is politically short-sighted on all counts.
Blue Mountains Significant Tree Register – deceitful faux conservation
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Bullaburra’s Angophora was a rare symbolic remnant of the dominant Angophora Forest habitat that once flourished in the Bullaburra area and which has earned listing on council’s Register of Significant Trees.
Consultation with a local (Level 5) arborist with expertise in Angophoras, had confirmed the tree an Angophora costata and “between 200 and 300 years old and that if given the chance will survive between 400 and 600 years.” So it predated Bullaburra (1924) and predated the colonisation of Australia (1788).
Why did local Blue Mountains Council turn its back on its own heritage register and on Mountains heritage. Had traditional owners been consulted?
Blue Mountains Council’s Significant Trees were in 1988 registered under Development Control Plan 9 (DCP9): the purpose of which was to identify and protect those trees listed on the Register; promote greater public awareness of the existence of the Register, and the individual items listed; ensure existing and, importantly, prospective land owners, are made aware of the Significant Trees which may be located on their property; and ensure correct on-going care and maintenance of those trees listed, through the recommendations included with the significant tree register.
DCP 9 was formally adopted in 21 June 1988 and since then had effected no legal weight or meaning. The tens of thousands spent on the plan then and since has been a financial misappropriation.
The then Federal Member for Macquarie (Blue Mountains), Bob Debus MP, openly supported and encouraged the RTA-come-RMS in its highway widening through Blue Mountains communities.
Debus had publicly praised the RTA for “doing exemplary work in consultation with…local communities.” (Blue Mountains Gazette 20081126).
Yet this Editor, who for the past seven years has observed and participated in numerous RTA-come-RMS community consultation workshops dealing with the Trucking Expressway mission along the Great Western Highway, has found all ‘community consultation’ to be but a recurring deceitful farce designed purely for public relations and so that on paper, community consultation was legally ‘seen to be done’.
The Juggernaut Cake was baked, and the community herded and selected to choose the colour of the icing. So thanks for coming dumb peasants!
The sad thing is that we see each community hoodwinked one by one, losing rights and amenity to an expanding Sydney conurbation of our Mountains. How many minutes will widening cut through the Mountains only to be added back in Sydney congestion and the chronic truck queues at Port Botany? If widening claims to address highway safety why does the six-lane M4 have the highest accident rate in the State?
Debus has publicly been the key driver of the highway widening and increased traffic policy prepared to splurge half a billion dollars to encourage more trucks on our roads and committing a teetering NSW Government already heading into deficit. Debus’ myopic fixation with trucks has cast him as a reckless pariah against the Federal government’s promise of meeting Kyoto emission targets. He and his babyboomer age group seem locked in a truck-centric mindset, one that is anti-rail like Premier Nick Greiner’s condemning of freight rail (1988-92) and like US President Eisenhower’s industrial superhighway ruination of Northern America back in the 1950s.
[Source: ‘They took all the trees’, 20081203, letter in the Blue Mountains Gazette local newspaper, in print]
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They took all the trees, put ‘em in a tree museum..
by Canadian singer, composer and lyricist Joni Mitchell from her classic hit ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ from her album ‘Ladies of the Canyon’ released in April 1970.
Joni Mitchell’s single cover
Her original recording was this single, but then released later on her album ‘Ladies of the Canyon’ (1970)
Yet forty three years hence dear lady and what have we learnt from your sad message about the bulldozing of Nature?
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“Big Yellow Taxi” became a hit in Joni’s native Canada (#14) as well as Australia (#6) and the UK (#11).
Joni: “I wrote ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart… this blight on paradise. That’s when I sat down and wrote the song.”
The song is known for its environmental concern – “They paved paradise to put up a parking lot” and “Hey farmer, farmer, put away that DDT now”.
Joni Mitchell in 1970
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The song line “They took all the trees, and put ’em in a tree museum…and charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em” refers to Foster Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu, which is a living museum of tropical plants, some rare and endangered.
These days, Honolulu’s Foster Botanical Garden has become home to hundreds of species of endangered Hawaiian and other exotic plants. The garden’s mission is to plan, develop, curate, maintain and study documented collections of tropical plants in an aesthetic setting for the purposes of conservation, botany, horticulture, education, and recreation. While it is very important to teach people about the natural flora of Hawaii, it is a shame that they have to be kept in such a tree museum and are not able to be appreciated in their natural settings.
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Colonising destruction of Natural Hawaii
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Bullaburra’s Angophora was that roadside tree, always there, estimated to be between up to 200 and 300 years old, but took only a few hours to chop down to a stump on April Fools Day to clear the way for highway widening work in Bullaburra.
The decision to remove the tree listed on council’s Significant Tree Register was made back in 2009. This is the coniving strategy of the RTA-come RMS employeing those with degrees in ‘Media Communications’ – this 21C black art of corporate propaganda. Move over 20th C Used Car Salesmen, Y-Gens in Media Communications are the new low-life to be avoided.
But the shock of seeing the 30-metre tall smooth-barked apple red gum being removed was too much for some local residents, who gathered beside it to take photos and quietly reflect.
Katoomba resident Aanya Mary said she was devastated by the loss of the tree and the public not being told when it was going to be removed. She called the decision to chop it “the easy and efficient option” and questioned if other solutions were thoroughly considered.
“This tree would have seen generations of Gundungurra and Darug people rest under its boughs and no doubt [the explorers] Lawson, Blaxland and Wentworth passed its gracious trunk.”
In a callous afterthought, the RTA-come-RMS has offered to use wood of the tree to create ukuleles and furniture. Can Chopin’s funeral march be played on a Ukele?
Some callous bureaucrat in the RTA-come-RMS suggested using the Angophora wood to make stupid UkelesNot even into traditional Aboriginal instruments, weapons or tools. The minds at RMS Paramatta head office are urbane and bewildered.
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Yet others, more attached to the tree and aware of the behind the scenes political deceit, have suggested making council coffins for those who signed off on the Angophora’s demise.
Blue Mountains failure to preserve Natural History
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<<The sudden and surreptitious removal of the mature heritage-listed Eucalypt at Bullaburra last week was avoidable and a total failure of our ability to preserve our natural history.
That tree was the property of the Blue Mountains community just as much as the community hall at Bullaburra.
When it can be arranged for the highway widening to bypass the community hall, there is no reason it couldn’t be diverted around another significant and far older landmark.
Not only did Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth pass close by this tree in 1813 but the following year the first road was built almost under its branches. The year after, 1815, Lachlan Macquarie and his entourage passed by this tree as the first public users of the road through the Blue Mountains. In the 1830s Charles Darwin also made the journey passed it.
Blue Mountains (..) Council has failed miserably to protect our natural history. It’s also obvious how totally toothless is the rhetoric around the Significant Tree Register.
The RTA-come-RMS suggestion to make use of the wood is an attempt to sidetrack and trivialises its destruction. Who needs a symbol of the endurance of natural beauty when you can have ukeleles and matches?
Trees like this are the Blue Mountains community’s natural history – not the RTA-come-RMS’s.
The bottom line is there is no legislation to protect our natural history, and any clowns with clout can get their way.
Why doesn’t the Blue Mountains (..) Council stand up for us and for the naturakl environment in matters like these?>>
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[Source: ‘Heritage tree’ (discretionary label by BMG editor), 20130417, by P.D. Bonney, of Faulconbridge, letter to the editor, in Blue Mountains Gazette (local newspaper), page 4, print only]
Ed: But when Government comes intimidating the homes and amenity of these passers-by? So loud the NYMBY’s plead for community support.
To reliable taxpayer-funded bureaucrats inside RTA-come-RMS, community NYMBYISM has become a strategic community vunerabilty so exploited to known consultant formalae. But so unprepared are communities like the Blue Mountains for exploitation that they are prone to and succumb to industrial rape, village by village, and cleverly silenced by the consultants.
But once the Government’s omnipotent Juggenaut invasion arrives and the overwhelming household helplessness, locals try selling up in vain and a few commit quiet, unreported suicide. It is ultimately then, that Government has come, seen and conquered its own taxpayers so that such issues shrink from mainstream media, are excluded from government statistics and so are relegated into invisiblity, the history cleansed and revised by the government consultants.
[This article was written as a letter by the Editor and first published in the Blue Mountains Gazette newspaper in print eight years ago on 20050202.
Back then, some of us realised the devastating scale of threat that the RTA Trucking Juggernaut posed for the Blue Mountains, notably a few older wiser folk did too. We attended token RTA Community Meetings which for Leura were then hosted by spin doctor Iain McLeod and RTA consultants.
But our vocal democratic concerns fell on deaf ears and crocodile smiles. In hindsight the ‘consultation’ was purely so that the RTA could record community attendance on paper as being ‘consultative’ and thus legally compliant before it bulldozed through our villages anyway. Leura was just one village of many.
Yet many affected locals not in the know, then belatedly started selling up and got pittance or went broke. This is a snapshot into tragic story of tyrannical bureaucracy bulldozing its power and trucking vested interest through a local community, as if this is not the Australia we know.
To follow in the coming years we attended RTA-come-RMS community meetings ahead of destruction of Katoomba, Medlow Bath, Lawson, Hazelbrook, Bullaburra and Mount Victoria.
Rebellious Blackheath looks set to be the last bastion of community resistance against the 4-laned trucking expressway juggernaut.]
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Back in 2005 this long established Leura Service Centre protested with a sign here to the RTA expressway development, reading:
Prompted by the protest sign of this highway business, as one passed by it on occasions along the highway, this sense of injustice hit a raw nerve. This inspired this Editor to write the following letter of solidarity to the local newspaper back in 2005.
<<Back when first coming up the Mountains, I reminisce a sense of arrival upon reaching Katoomba’s old highway sign: ‘Altitude 1017m’ and stirred by the stands of grey slender and bowed mountain ash, robust on the ridgetop. With Sydney far behind, I had arrived in the cooler upper Mountains; my escape and destination.
I have since learned these unusual bowed trees are ‘Eucalyptus oreades’, special to the upper Mountains. But these twenty odd ‘oreades’ just opposite Katoomba hospital are now being clear-felled by the RTA to widen the highway. Temporary fencing is up and the dozers are in. Within weeks another tangible remnant of Mountains natural-heritage will disappear. Sadly, the outcome of the little known ancient ridgetop spring, just below, will fall to the discretion of drainage contractors. This spring has for eons sustained a fern microclimate and fed Leura Cascades/Falls. How really precious is what’s downstream?
Sydneysiders have been ‘opening up the west’ since Cox made convicts force the western road across the ridgetop in 1815. Progress and populations beyond continue to demand a better, more efficient transit across our Mountains. Widening the ‘great’ Western Highway surely will dissipate weekend bumper traffic and allow truck drivers to enjoy fewer gear changes. But expedient are the defiant roadside businesses, heritage and residents’ amenity. With the roadside planting tokenly native, disregarding journey experiences to become the same as anywhere else. NSW’s population absorption policy is not ours, yet Sydney’s metropolis officially extends to Mount Victoria. What transit efficiencies do these highwaymen plan to force through Mt Vic…perhaps our last built-heritage bastion?
Progress through the Blue Mountains, of all places, deserves to be tempered by a proactive rigorous heritage conservation strategy. As our unique built, natural and cultural heritage of the Mountains piece by piece disappears, so too does its magic and the Mountains appeal as a destination, sanctuary and home.>>
[This article was written as a letter by the Editor and first published in the Blue Mountains Gazette newspaper in print 20080827]
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…come…
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…is the same road-centric organisation, different in name only.
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And is lobbied constantly by the …
and the…
…for bigger and faster and more roads.
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<<Before fuel got expensive and before climate change got serious, road-centric transport planning culminated in the Auslink national transport policy with a heavy bias to building roads. Auslink remains the unquestioned policy behind why the Great Western Highway is steadily being widened out to four lanes to Orange.
As the RTA carves its juggernaut through the Mountains, trees are felled, creeks polluted and villages and towns are losing their rural identity to a suburban sameness. Communities have become divided by a wide, noisy and anti-pedestrian barrier. Katoomba, Leura and Wentworth Falls, have become prefixed by ‘north’ and ‘south’ (of the highway). I wager north and south Hazelbrook/Lawson/Bullaburra will follow suit and Blackheath’s on the cards. The millions to add two extra lanes are not to alleviate weekend tourist bottlenecks, but so long-haul truck drivers can drive faster.
Bob Debus is pushing to spend some $450m to bypass Mount Victoria for a route “more suited to the operation of heavy vehicles.” (Debus website) But spending millions to encourage more trucks on our roads is a poor economic gamble. Rising fuel costs of trucking are forecast to price out the viability of produce and exports. A key driver is the constant lobbying of MPs by road lobby groups. NRMA’s Motoring and Services donated $225,000 to political parties around last year’s federal election. NRMA’s president justified this as “a reality of being involved in the political process today” (Sun-Herald 10-8-08).
I recall voting out Kerry Bartlett for declaring his dumb Bells Superhighway hand. Bob’s conveying the same road-centric thinking; albeit via a different route. Take the following comparable statistics from the Australian Rail Association: “A train between Melbourne and Sydney will use 45,000 litres less fuel, replace 145 semi-trailers and saves 135 tonnes of greenhouse gases.”
So why are we bypassing our rundown rail? >>
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…the Elephant in the Room..
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<<The Australasian Railway Association (ARA) is a not-for-profit member-based association that represents passenger, freight, track, manufacturing, construction, supply and other rail companies in Australasia.
The Australasian Railway Association (ARA) is the peak body representing all passenger, freight, track operators and the wider rail supply industry in Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia.
Our fundamental purpose is to create an environment that will permit the Australasian rail industry to prosper. When issues arise that affect the whole industry, the ARA takes the lead facilitating an industry response.
The ARA is actively involved in the development of rail policy to ensure the industry’s views are represented.
As well as shaping policy in the areas of passenger, freight, rail safety regulatory reform, the environment, technology and research, the ARA is also involved in programmes aimed at improving the productivity, capacity and overall safety of the Australasian rail industry.
. Our Vision
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The Australasian Rail Industry’s vision is that Rail will become the transport mode of choice because of its economic, environmental and social advantages.
In achieving this we aim to provide enhanced passenger services for our communities and have more trains carrying increased volumes of bulk freight and goods.>>
Short Term Minister for Infrastructure and Transport
(so long as it excludes Rail)
Short Term Minister for Regional Development and Local Government
(so long as it excludes Rail)
Government destruction of Bullaburra has begun. Last Monday, April Fools Day 2013, they came and killed Bullaburra’s magificent Angophora to make way for a trucking expressway through the village. But who are the fools who destroy our native heritage?
To many perhaps this is just another tree. Some people value trees and ecology. Others have deep value for wildlife and other animals, especially their pets. Many people value where they live and grow very attached to where they live for reasons that can seem difficult for others to appreciate. But it is the existence rights of species that humans ignore besides their own self-serving interests. Male Baby Boomers remain the most extreme in their self-righteousness, and those in government prescribe utilitarian dictates over the rights of the few.
Elie Wiesel, novelist, political activist, and Humanities Professor at Boston University, has said that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.
A native tree that once was part of an Angophora (Sydney Redgum) forest, existed way back when the three explorers Lawson, Wenthworth and Blaxland crossed the Blue Mountains in 1813. They would have passed right past this tree. Two years later road builder William Cox similarly would have laid his rough track, and in 1836 Major Mitchell upgrading the road too would have passed by this tree. For nearly two centuries travellers have passed by this tree, most probably not even giving it a glance. Now it is gone and the opportunity to respect and appreciate this remnant of natural heritage has gone with it.
We tried to save you
Campaign to Save Bullaburra’s 300 year old Angophora back in 2008
(Blue Mountains Gazette, 20081203)
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Last January, spiteful people set fire to two Hermmansburg ghost gums made famous in Albert Namatjira’s landscape paintings. In 2006, Barcaldine’s famous ghost gum, ‘the tree of knowledge’ was poisoned. Just last week an old gum tree in the Rylstone public school was poisoned. Human hate for native trees has pervaded Australian colonising society since Cook landed at Camp Cove and chopped down trees for firewood.
A local arborist with expertise in native trees of the Blue Mountains including Angophoras, estimated in 2007 that the Bullaburra Angophora to have been over 300 years old. It was still healthy and still growing as confirmed by the solid core of the severed trunk.
Now it lies like a dead harpooned whale like roadkill beside the highway, where it has stood all those decades.
This Angophora was recognised as a ‘Significant Tree‘ on the local Blue Mountains Council’s Significant Tree Register back on 17th July 1985 and formally adopted on 21st June 1988, at the time of Australia’s Bicentennary.
No opposition against killing the tree was communicated by the Blue Mountains Council to the RTA-come-RMS. Indeed, this is one of many such ‘significant trees’ that have been killed for development convenience in recent years. Clearly, the Blue Mountains Council’s Significant Tree Register has become disingenuous and lying greenwash.
The death of the Angophora is the begining of the end of Bullaburra. The highway village is set to become a siding for four-laned trucking expressway so that B-double trucks can rumble 24/7 through Blue Mountains towns and villages, nudging 90kph on cruise control.
The rural amenity of this highway village is to be lobotomised into a mono-design urban landscape taking on the same monotonous blandness as any other expressway in the country. The government euphemises this as:
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“to achieve greater consistency in the design of the Blue Mountains area to achieve a simple and unified design of the highway and its elements.”
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The fundamental basis for the government’s conversion of this regional highway into a national trucking expressway route is simply “to improve travel times” for trucks, so that more and larger trucks are encouraged to use the route.
The Bullaburrra section is to cost taxpayers $80 million and will see 3.6 hectares of native bushland destroyed on the basis that the vegetation “is already dissected and fragmented“. So it seems that moral relativism allows for wedge development just like a little bit of corruption doesn’t hurt anyone.
But as if the twisted morality isn’t bad enough. It is the greenwashing that really twists the knife in. The RTA-come-RMS in its Review of Environmental Effects maintains that the expressway development aims:
“to protect the natural systems and ecology of the corridor”
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[Source: ‘The Great Western Highway Upgrade – Bullaburra East, Review of Environmental Effects’, Vol.2, July 2009, Roads and Traffic Authority, New South Wales Government, p.2.]
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However, the expressway development will simply result in the heart of rural Bullaburra being ripped out and the amenity reduced to a trucking siding adopting a benale concrete landscape akin to the bland urban character of an upper Blaxland, and mirroring what has happened to nearby lobotomised Lawson.
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“It’s just really tragic after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years we can’t leave behind something as primitive as government sponsored execution.”
~ Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, when introducing a bill that would end the death penalty on the Federal level.
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Progress of Hate
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Under Australia’s Federal Auslink Policy the national freight thinking is road-centric and all about replacing real trains with road trains. Behind this trucking expressway scheme is a powerful and influential trucking lobby group who donate generously to the political parties that control the New South Wales Government, and various politicians including retired Blue Mountains MP Bob Debus, who has long been a driver of this trucking expressway.
The New South Wales Government department behind this scheme is the RTA-come-RMS (Roads and Maritime Services). In 2007, the then General Manager – Environmental Branch, Ms Erica Adamson, claimed that to retain the Angophora consequential loss of tree roots and pruning would instigate the decline of the tree. “For road construction and safety reasons the tree will have to be removed…to maintain sight lines (for speeding trucks).”
“It’s called progress” they say. For the Blue Mountains it is being inflicted at any cost – economic, social, environmental.
The idea of ‘progress‘ is an economic one that was borne out of Western 18th Century hard-nosed Industrial Revolution and perhaps extending back to the 16th Century Enlightenment of Europe and perhaps even back to when the Iron Age triumphed so aggressively and effectively over the Bronze Age.
Perhaps progress remains subjective only with the progressor who doggedly in his pursuit rough shods over others in the process. Perhaps the idea of progress is a myth. Is the human condition better off as a result? Are we advancing as a society by rough shodding over others and over what is left of Ecology and Nature? The philosophy of ‘^Deep Ecology‘ posits otherwise.
“Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
The Dangerous Trucking Menace is becoming increasingly prevalent across the Blue Mountains on both the Great Western Highway and the Bells Line of Road.
This is because the ‘Roads and Traffic Authority‘ – rebranded but culturally unchanged to the ‘Transport Roads and Maritime Services‘ is tasked to re-engineer the Great Western Highway, a regional and local road, to facilitate more trucks.
The trucking mandate is to transform the highway into an expressway designed for bigger and faster trucks, just like the F3 Motorway between outer Sydney and the regional city of Newcastle, as infamously deadly that the F3 is.
The trucking mandate is national and driven by an Australia-wide freight transport policy which prioritises 95% road and 5% rail. The truck-centric policy is steered by self-interested influential trucking magnates and their industry, whose driving catch-phrase is ‘time is money‘ and so any community along the highway that slows their trucks down must be dealt with. They fund political economic rationalism which prefers to outsource and privatise instead of responsibly investing in national rail freight infrastructure.
Highway communities are treated as second class citizens. Residents like the many thousands across the Blue Mountains are increasing exposed to the Dangerous Trucking Menace, when sharing the highway and from their homes:
Bigger trucks and more B-Doubles
Speeding trucks
Tailgating trucks
Trucks over the centre double lines
Truck drivers frequently seen talking on a mobile phone while driving
Exhaust brakes used at all hours through towns and villages
Collisions and deaths
Overturned trucks
Broken down trucks
Trucks on fire
Truck tankers with gas, fuel or hazardous chemical leaks
Selfish truckies sleeping outside residents at all hours with refrigerator motors running at Mt Victoria
Same selfish truckies found urinating and defecating in residents’ front verges at Mt Victoria.
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[Ed: And truckies and their supporting wives wonder why truckies have a bad reputation and often cop blame? Trucking is not a profession. It is a uncontrolled cowboy skill-easy job earning pittance, attracting imbeciles and causing reckless maiming and death. This Editor has continued to hold an ‘HC’ licence from 1989, but income-wise has long since moved on.]
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Source: Blackheath Highway Action Group
‘The Blackheath Highway Action group was formed in 2008 to fight a proposal to turn the Great Western Highway
into a 4 lane high productivity freight vehicle (25/26/30m B-doubles) route across the Blue Mountains.
Website: ^http://www.bag.asn.au
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Hardly a week passes without some report of a truck-related incident along the Great Western Highway and especially along the Hume Freeway, F3 Motorway and Pacific Highway, and that is just in New South Wales. One local resident of the Blue Mountains, a Marcus Padley, terms these ‘Mack Truck Moments‘. If only it were funny. Last month Sarina Heta in her Kia Rio sedan wasn’t laughing when she was violently crushed between two B-doubles on the Great Western highway at Blackheath.
Australia has no central register of truck incidents, but if it did one wagers that the occurrence would be a daily one. This is unacceptable yet the trucking menace is encouraged and poorly controlled or policed.
Currently, the Great Western Highway is being widened to four lanes at Hazelbrook at great expense and considerable delay due to poor due diligence and mismanagement. In the re-engineered design, all interests of trucks are priorities by the road engineers, while local residents have little or no say. As each stage of widening transformation takes place, successive affected communities become disheartened and confronted by the bulldozing of the regional highway and its replacement with a much wider trucking expressway.
Lawson has been completely obliterated and its character ‘lobotomised‘ as a town.
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Lawson before the Trucking Expressway bulldozers
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Neo-LawsonShops bulldozedVillage Character urban lobotomised
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Soon it will be neighbouring Bullaburra’s turn and highway properties are already up for sale.
Bullaburra: On Trucking Death Row
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The Bells Line of Road across the Blue Mountains is also having its side shoulders widened to accommodate B-double trucks 24/7 and is involving the destruction of native vegetation for kilometres. Stage 1 is around the agricultural village of Bilpin.
Many sand and gravel B-Double style trucks use the Bells Line of Road between quarries and Sydney. They are paid a trip rate and so travel at excessive speed to maximise trips per day. The road has no speed cameras and is rarely patrolled by police. It has become an infamous trucking cowboy route. In June 2012, a sand loaded semi-trailer collided with two cars near Mt Tomah. The truck was probably over the centre double lines like they usually are.
In May 2011, a gravel truck overturned on the Bells Line of Road while exceeding the speed limit. The road is a renowned trucking menace and car drivers and motorbike riders use it at their own risk. In July 2009, a motorcyclist has been killed on the Bells Line of Road 10 kilometres west of the Mount Tomah. It must have surely been a ‘Mack Truck Moment‘.
The government’s Trucking Expressway Mandate is to keep widening the Great Western Highway out to mainly four lanes between outer Sydney where the 6-lane M4 Motorway currently links to, and all the way out to Orange and beyond. The long-term trucking strategy to eventually encourage 24/7 trucking of B-doubles between Sydney and Perth and Darwin. In western Victoria even B-triples have been introduced, which are basically Road Trains – give the trucking lobby time.
B-doubles have to date been prohibited from the Great Western Highway due to its narrow unsuitable design and to respect the fact that it passes through nearly two dozen regional town and villages. But that is constantly being challenged and undermined by hard-nosed government policy.
The dangerous misguided premise by the policy and by road engineers is that a wider a faster trucking expressway will be safer than the existing highway, yet the evidence refutes that. All one needs to do is consider the repeated statistical record of trucks incidents along the already widened sections of the Great Western highway, and indeed along the RTA/RMS’s favourite creation, its F3 Motorway.
The following recent reports of trucking incidents are testament to the trucking menace that trucking expressways attract.
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2nd March 2013: ‘Overturned Truck Closes F3 at Mount White’
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<<Mount White: The F3 remains closed northbound approaching the Old Pacific Highway Overpass in Mount White due to a truck accident. Motorists are being diverted off the F3 onto the Old Pacific Highway at the Hawkesbury Interchange in Mooney Mooney. Emergency services and RMS crews are on site, working to clear the accident as quickly as possible…>
<<All southbound and northbound lanes have reopened on the F3 near Motorway Link Road in Warnervale now that gas bottles are no longer leaking on the back of a truck. Gas cylinders began leaking on the back of a truck near Motorway Link Road about 6.45pm, forcing the closure of southbound lanes and one northbound lane.>>
<<There was a lucky escape for a truck driver on the Central Coast yesterday. Just after 11am, a Rutherford-bound semi trailer full of clay caught fire, forcing the closure of northbound lanes of the F3 Freeway at Mount White. The driver, from Victoria, had pulled the rig over after seeing smoke billowing from the engine. He escaped unharmed but the same couldn’t be said for the prime mover.>>
7 Feb 2013: ‘Hume Highway traffic affected after truck roll over’
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<<Both northbound lanes of the Hume Highway were closed south of Tarcutta following the accident but one northbound lane was since been re-opened. The accident about 15km south of Tarcutta occurred shortly after 9am this morning. Emergency services are in attendance and a HAZMAT team has been sent following reports of diesel over the road. Motorists are advised to drive with caution if in the area and to allow for extra time on their journey.>>
Nov 2012: ‘Traffic slow at Ourimbah following truck rollover’
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<<Traffic is slowing on the F3 Freeway near Ourimbah on the Central Coast where a semi-trailer rolled onto its side about 9.30am. It is understood the driver was trapped for a short time but has since been freed and police are on-site managing the clean up and traffic control.>>
Mar 2012: ‘Police target second trucking firm over safety’
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<<New South Wales police are targeting another truck company over suspected serious safety breaches. Trucks from the South Australian-based Scott’s transport are being stopped at several heavy vehicle checking stations, including the F3 freeway at Mount White and the Hume Highway at Marulan. Officials from Roads and Maritime Services are also involved in the operation.
Police say one of the company’s B-double trucks was caught driving on the Hume Highway at Mittagong at 142 kilometres per hour early on Monday morning. Officers are searching for 32 Scott’s trucks out of the company’s fleet of more than 300, and say that number may rise. They say the trucks will then undergo a comprehensive mechanical inspection. The investigation follows an operation against Sydney-based Lennons Transport Services, where police say speed limiting devices in numerous trucks had been tampered with.
A Lennons driver is before the courts charged over a crash that killed three people on the Hume Highway at Menangle in January.>>
Jul 2011: ‘Delays on freeway after truck rollover’
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<<NSW motorists on the F3 freeway are being warned to expect significant delays after a B-double truck rolled over at Cooranbong southwest of Newcastle. The truck, which was carrying milk, rolled onto its side and skidded for several metres at the Freemans Drive overpass before being hit by a ute.
The truck driver was taken to hospital but the woman driving the ute escaped injury. A salvage operation is underway but it is expected the freeway will be blocked for several hours. Southbound traffic is being diverted at Palmers Drive to re-enter at Freemans Drive southbound on-ramp.>>
Lost load … the scene at Chullora where a refrigerated pantech fell from a truck
[Source: Picture: Bill Hearne, The Daily Telegraph]
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<<It was a year of carnage for the state’s truck drivers, with the number of fatal accidents increasing by more than 90 per cent, government statistics reveal.
There were 23 fatal crashes involving heavy rigid trucks – non-articulated vehicles greater than eight tonnes – in 2009. This was up from 12 a year earlier, the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) said. The BITRE data also showed the number of people killed in accidents involving heavy rigid trucks in NSW was up 100 per cent to 24, when deaths in Australia decreased by 14.7 per cent.
The RTA dismissed claims that the increase in the road death statistics were a cause for concern. The RTA’s NSW Centre for Road Safety director Soames Job said the increase was the result of a reduction in deaths the year before. “The main number that produces the outcome is the low number of deaths the previous year. It was extraordinary that we had so few in 2008,” Dr Job said.
Fatal accidents involving articulated trucks fell from 47 in 2008 to 34 in 2009, BITRE said. The figures came as a truck driver had a lucky escape in Sydney’s west on Tuesday night.
The refrigerated section of a meat carrier sheared from the truck and rolled on to the Hume Highway flyover at Chullora. A crane was brought in to right the truck to clear the road.
Dr Job said in many crashes, the smaller vehicle might be at fault. “Lots of these accidents will involve speed and fatigue and that is what we are trying to address,” he said. “We have this large program of speed enforcement in areas where there is known heavy truck traffic and that is why we have said we’ll roll out 20 locations of point-to-point speed cameras across our highway network”..>>
Aug 2010: ‘B-double crashes on F3, shutting southbound lanes’
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<<Motorists using the F3 Freeway are being told to divert their travel or face significant traffic delays after a B-double carrying gas cylinders crashed today. The truck was carrying 1600 nine kilogram cylinders when it hit the eastern brick wall just before the Hawkesbury River Bridge about 9:15am.
No one was injured but the crash forced police to close two of the three southbound lanes. Northbound lanes remain open and all lanes are expected to be opened by 4pm. Southbound motorists are being urged to avoid the area by taking the Pacific Highway exit at Brooklyn,” a police statement says. “The gas cylinders are being removed by hand for safety reasons prior to the B-double being removed. Inquiries into the crash are continuing.>>
Jun 2010: ‘Driver dies after flipping truck on F3’
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<<A man has died in a truck accident on the F3 at Mount White on the New South Wales central coast yesterday. Police say the driver was turning into a heavy vehicle checking station when his trailer jackknifed at about 3:30pm. The truck then flipped onto the driver’s side before sliding into a power pole. The male driver, who has not been formally identified, was killed. A report will be prepared for the Coroner.>>
Apr 2010: ‘Highway smash raises response time questions’
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<<The New South Wales Roads Minister says the RTA did not act quickly enough to re-open the F3 Freeway after an accident south of Newcastle yesterday, which left motorists stranded for hours.
A flat-bed truck ran into the back of a fully loaded fuel tanker on the freeway around midday near Mount White, with the accident closing all northbound lanes.
The RTA set up a contraflow around the accident site, using southbound lanes for motorists heading north, and diverting southbound traffic along the old Pacific Highway.
Questions are being asked why it took so long to set up the contraflow, which was not in place until at least eight hours after the crash.
Hazmat crews worked to remove fuel from the tanker, with the Fire Brigade declaring the area safe sometime around midnight.
The Roads and Transport Minister David Campbell says he will be meeting with the RTA today to discuss the delay in re-opening the road.>>
<<A truck driver has been left with serious head injuries after an accident on the New South Wales central coast. Police say the accident happened on the F3 Freeway at Mount White at about 11:40am (AEST). It is believed a flat-bed vegetable truck ran into the back of a fully laden petrol tanker…>>
Sep 2009: ‘Delays on Sydney’s F3 after another fatality’
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<<Traffic is being delayed on the F3 freeway as police investigate a death near the Mooney Mooney Bridge, south of Gosford. Police say a man fell onto the road and died just after 1pm AEST. All northbound lanes have been closed while investigations are carried out…>>
Aug 2009: ‘Young parents and baby die in F3 inferno’
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The wreckage on the F3 after the fatal crashA couple and baby killed
[Photo: Matt Black Productions]
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<<A young Gosford couple and their baby were killed when their car burst into flames in a crash involving a B-double truck and another car on the F3 freeway on the NSW Central Coast yesterday night.
Police said two cars stopped on the freeway before a truck struck both vehicles from behind, killing a 27-year-old woman, a 32-year-old man and a five-month-old baby at 10.50pm. The impact caused one of the cars and the truck to catch fire. There was also another triple fatality in central-northern NSW about 10.30am today on Newell Highway near Narrabri.
Police said the bodies of the young family were found in the charred car on the 110 km/h marked stretch of road near the Mount White weigh-bridge. Two other people were taken to Gosford Hospital with various injuries.
Metropolitan crash investigator Sergeant Peter Jenkins said the family’s car was completely “incinerated”. “For some reason the two vehicles have become stationary in lane one, northbound, they’re not in the breakdown lane, they’re actually still in the traffic lane,” he told Macquarie Radio today.
“The young family’s car is the southern vehicle, another northbound car has braked and stopped and swerved to miss it and entered into the breakdown lane.
“Since that’s happened the truck driver’s been exposed to these two vehicles and he’s done what he can, but he hasn’t been able to avoid these two vehicles.” He said the truck driver was suffering from shock and had been discharged from hospital after speaking to police.
Towers Transport general manager John Perkins said the truck driver was very upset. “He has no apparent physical injuries … he’s extremely distraught,” Mr Perkins said.
He would not comment on the circumstances surrounding the accident but said the company had never been involved in a fatal crash. “We’ve been in business for 20 years, we’ve got about 50 trucks, and this is the first time we’ve been faced with something like this,” Mr Perkins said.
The driver of the second car was taken to Gosford Hospital for treatment, but police have been unable to to speak to him. His condition is unknown. The family has been identified and some relatives have been notified of their deaths, he said.
Sergeant Jenkins played down claims the stretch of road was dangerous, saying he hadn’t been able to attribute a serious crash in the area to the design or condition of the road in the past 20 years.
“I think the F3 is actually quite a good stretch of road in most parts,” he said.
“Inquiries into the circumstances leading up to the crash are continuing,” a police spokesman said.
‘Expect long delays’
Northbound lanes on the F3 freeway out of Sydney have reopened to traffic but motorists are warned to expect long delays.
All northbound lanes were closed while police removed the bodies and wreckage and carried out an investigation until about 11.20am today.
Despite reopening the lanes, traffic is still banked up for almost 10 kilometres between Mount White and the Hawkesbury River, the Road and Traffic Authority says.
“All lanes are open on the F3, but traffic will take a while to clear, an RTA spokesman told AAP.
“Traffic is still heavy with significant delays and people who have been diverted on to the Pacific Highway will also experience significant delays.”
It is the second major crash in two days on the F3 in that area. Four people escaped serious injury in a six-vehicle crash caused when a piece of scaffolding fell off a semitrailer at Mooney Mooney yesterday.
Police are appealing for anyone who might have seen the crash and are yet to speak to crash investigators to contact them via Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.>>
<<Car drivers have had lots of restrictions placed on them over the years in an attempt to reduce the road toll including school zones due to a slight increase in accidents. A 100% increase in heavy truck deaths is not acceptable. Reduce their speeds to 60kph and reduce fatigue by reducing driving time to 6 hours per day and accidents due to speed or fatigue will drop. Imagine what would happen if car deaths increased 100%. Would we see changes, you can bet on it.>>
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Rod Pickin:
<<Until the maximum road speed for heavy vehicles is limited to 80kph, you can expect a continued increase in accidents/deaths involving these vehicles. Currently heavy vehicles are being driven dangerously and at high speed as a result of work/deadline pressures imposed upon drivers by owners/operators and major supermarket customers all sanctioned by govt. bodies.
Truly how rediculous is it that a fully loaded B-Double even road train fuel/gas tanker is legally allowed on our highways in the wet to travel at 100kph? that is just inviting major drama so one is entitled to ask, who is putting presure on who in order that this be allowed.>
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Rob:
<<I’ve noticed the lack of ‘100 speed limited’ signs on most trucks these days as they go flying past me on the highways while I’m obeying the limit.>>
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Julian:
<<This is sad. The carnage on the F3 goes on, mostly involving semi-trailers. When I take my family on holidays, trucks tail-gate us at 120Kph, and scare the hell out of me.>>
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Young parents and toddler die in fiery crash:
<<The solution is simple. make speed limit for trucks 70kmh max and must not move out of left lane for whatever reason. the F3 is the most dangerous freeway I have ever driven on, doing 100-110 on blind hills and bends a truck has no way of stopping fast if it has to.>>
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David:
<<I drive the F3 every day and it is a miracle that more accidents such as these do no occur. In peak hour the average speed of vehicles is in excess of speed limit and cars do this with the knowledge that they are highly unlikely to be caught. When police do drive along the freeway they also average around 10 kph above the speed limit and cars just happily follow them at that speed.
In the road works area you have speed variances of between 80 kph (speed limit) and 120 kph with average of around 100 kph. To sit on the speed limit along that road is nearly more dangerous than speeding. This is a tragedy as are all road deaths and one can only hope that this does force the authorities into action so that something positive comes from it to get some sanity back into the way drivers behave on this road.>>
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mirage:
<<I’m sure its another example of a truck driver that was speeding – I travel every few weeks up and down the F3 in a normal sedan at 100-110km per hour and most trucks fly past me except when going up the hills…the Police are not doing enough and some truck drivers just think they can do what they want…same attitude problem as the ferry drivers on the harbour and bus drivers…they think the road is theirs and they are smarter than the rest, professional drivers…they should know that in the end the extra speed doesnt make much difference…>>
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More Trains, Less Trucks:
<<One partial solution would be to build a freight line so that we could send more goods by rail. Think about howmany trucks would be off the road for each extra train. I am sure that the truckies would complain about potential loss of jobs, but that wasn’t the case when the Ghan was extended from Alice Springs to Darwin.
Instead of losing jobs, the truckies found that they had more short haul jobs supplying the freight trains and less long haul jobs with all of the associated safety issues.>>
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Kate:
<<I used to drive the F3 regularly but now catch the train as it is too dangerous. If you look at the accident record over the past few years, you will see most involve trucks. The F3 is one of the few decent roads in the state, yet now ruined by huge speeding semis and other trucks that are a terrible hazard to cars. On top of that everyone speeds like the devil, with impunity it seems. All those massive tonnes of heavy goods in transit should be shipped by rail. The whole transport thing is getting completely out of hand.>>
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frederick:
<<I am often horrified at the increase in trucks on our roads and the frequent aggressive driving adopted by these drivers. Driving generally on our roads has become so bad that this sort of horror is going to keep happening. Anyone who drives at or near the speed limit would know. Unless of course our pollies have the guts to do something about it and the Police start to enforce some of the existing road rules. With three warning signs before every fixed speed camera we might as well adopt a new slogan for NSW – THE DUMB STATE!
How many more lives is it going to take before we come to our senses?>>
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Ian C. Purdie:
<<Yes, so trucks are speed limited to 100 kph, the sign on the back says so. That would be the reason they either tail gate you at 110 kph or overtake.>>
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waqi13:
<<I travel on F3 several times each week for work. At least once a week I have a close call with truck drivers not paying attention to what is going on around them. It seems that 90% of trucks have blinkers and side mirrors that don’t work – they change lanes at the drop of a hat with no indication, and in the worst case scenario to overtake another truck that they cannot go fasther than anyway – creating a long line of traffic, chugging up a hill at much less then the speed limit.
I have learnt to give trucks a wide berth, because they will do what they want to do without checking for any cars around them.>>
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Daniel:
<<It’s a dangerous road at night and drivers need to have full concentration on the freeway. they need to stick to the speed limit. Ive driven on it so many times and I do 110 and others are flying past me all the time. Trucks are going faster than the 100 they are supposed to be doing. Most of the time now I use the old Pacific Highway through to Gosford. its just too dangerous with all the rats on the road.>>
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JSKS:
<<It’s very sad indeed. In fact 110km/hr is a very fast speed for a fully loaded truck. It’s not easy for the truck to stop that easily when their loads are full. At 10.30pm, the truck light shining distance is at best 30 meters. I believed by the time the driver realised that there is a car in front, it’s too late to stop effectively. In other countries, while the Freeway limit is 110km/hr, the maximum speed limit for truck is only 90km/hr. Yes, this will delay delivery time but I think HUMAN LIFE is more important than delivery time.>
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SP233K:
<<I drive on the F3 every day, and seriously no one obeys speed limits,they tailgate,they speed like crazy,the have no regard for anyone else,trucks speed and change lanes cutting people off and don’t care at all. Every day i worry i will end up in an accident and as soon as it gets dark trucks drive about a thousand times worse,they would have no way of stopping quickly.
Police constantly pull over cars (in the event there are actually police patrolling which is not very often). I really think they should be pulling over trucks as well. I hope this is a warning to everyone to be more careful on the F3, surely there have been enough horrific accidents for everyone to see how dangerous it is.
My heart goes out to the families of the people involved in last night’s accident. I drove past this morning and it really was a horrible scene.>>
May 2009: ‘B-double involved in F3 collision with car’
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<<There has been yet another traffic accident on the F3 involving a B-double truck, overnight. About 10.40pm last night (Tuesday), the driver of the B-double truck, a 38-year-old man from Cundletown, allegedly changed lanes and ran straight into a car being driven by a 63-year-old man from Umina. Both vehicles were travelling north along the freeway at Wahroonga, near Alexandria Pde.
When the car was hit, it spun out of control, police said, and collided with the median guardrail. The driver of the car was trapped until emergency crews cut him from the wreckage.
He was taken to the Royal North Shore Hospital with suspected back injuries and remains in a serious but stable condition. Hornsby Police have told the Advocate they will wait on the results of blood test before taking any action. No charges have yet been laid.>>
Apr 2009: ‘F3 truck ‘cut off’ before cliff plunge’
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<<Police are searching for the driver of a white Kenworth truck seen close to a semitrailer that plunged 80 metres off the F3, north of Sydney yesterday. Emergency services workers have recovered the body of the 40-year-old driver. The driver is reported to have been married with a young child.
The semitrailer will be salvaged by crane from 8pm today, with northbound traffic to be diverted from the F3 at Wahroonga. The B-Double Linfox semitrailer was carrying toilet paper when it crashed through a safety barrier at the side of the freeway and fell into the valley near Hornsby about 11.35am yesterday.
Two northbound lanes of the F3 were closed and traffic was diverted after the crash. Police are investigating reports the Sydney man had swerved to miss another truck which had changed lanes in front of him, before his vehicle speared off the road. Police today appealed for the driver of the Kenworth truck to come forward.
“We are appealing for the driver of a white Kenworth that was close to the [semitrailer] at the time of the crash to contact police through the Crime Stoppers hotline and tell us what they know or what they might have seen at the time the truck went over the railing,” a NSW Police spokeswoman said.
Senior Sergeant Peter Jenkins of the Metropolitan Crash Investigation Unit said witnesses told police there were some trucks near the semitrailer before the crash happened.
“It would apply at this stage that they might not have contributed to the crash. They might be totally innocent people driving along. But we would like to interview them because they may know something about the reason why this gentleman has left the roadway,” he said. “So we are appealing to them as witnesses at this stage.”
Senior Sergeant Jenkins said it was raining quite heavily when the accident occurred and police would be investigating all the possible accident factors, including weather, road surface, traffic, mechancial issues and the driver’s schedule.
But Phil Easterbrook, who lives near where the accident happened and heard a bang, said the accident was not unexpected. “We always hear the sound of horns going off and of braking. They are [hooting] to avert an accident because people are cutting them off,” he said. “We hear banging quite regularly from vehicles from accidents happening.”
Mr Easterbrook, who used to drive a truck, said trucks would try to build up speed as they went up the hill, and so would not like other vehicles cutting them off.
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ROAD SURFACE HAZARD
Paul Gerrard, who uses the F3 daily to travel from Kellyville to his work in Tuggerah and back, said the road surface where the accident occurred had been a serious hazard for a few months.
“Approximately four to five months ago the original freeway road surface [bitumen] was removed by mechanical pavement machines in an overnight operation that went for several weeks,” he said. “In the absence of signs it appears the pavement was removed to enable the whole freeway to be resurfaced with bitumen after the widening project [of the freeway] is completed.
Mr Gerrard said the northbound lanes, which were resurfaced, now had a rough texture and were dangerous to drive on especially during heavy rain. “The road gets far too much water and there’s no control. My experience is that, during heavy rain, drivers must slow to approximately 70kmh or the car aquaplanes left. It is an expectation and not random.”
He said the rails along these lanes were dented from large impacts of vehicles hitting them.
An RTA spokesman said that, while it could not comment on the accident as it was the subject of a police investigation, concrete roads such as the ones on the F3 were not uncommon in NSW.
“The RTA regularly carries out tests on road surface across the state and this section of road was last tested in August and September of last year. These tests showed that the road surface provided adequate wet-weather grip,” the spokesman said. The RTA spokesman said it understood the accident took place “on a downhill section where surface water would not accumulate”, and advised motorists to slow down and adjust their driving when there was wet weather.
From 2003 to 2007, there were six crashes reported on the 1km northbound section of of the F3 just north of the Edgeworth David Avenue overpass at Wahroonga, the spokesman said.
None of the crashes involved heavy vehicles and there were no deaths, he said.
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CRANE FAILED TO MOVE SEMI-TRAILER
A crane was brought in to lift the semitrailer, but a 7?-hour operation from 4.30pm to midnight by emergency services failed to move it.
“The boom on it to go down to the truck was not long enough,” an RTA spokeswoman said. A larger 400-tonne crane would be brought in to lift the truck tonight, the spokeswoman said.
It was not yet decided which company would be supplying the crane, although it was likely Linfox would foot the bill, she said.
The RTA said the crane would take three to four hours to assemble, and the same time to disassemble. It said it would take four hours to move the truck. The RTA will close access to the F3 northbound from the Pacific Highway and Pennant Hills Road at Wahroonga during the salvage operation.
Traffic would rejoin the F3 at Berowa. Diversions were expected to be in place until 8am tomorrow, the RTA said. Southbound lanes would not be affected. Yesterday’s fears that the fuel spilt from the truck would cause environmental damage have also dissipated, NSW Fire Brigades spokesman Craig Brierley said.
The diesel from the truck spread over a large area and sank into the soil beneath the truck, but did not reach the water catchment area nearby, Mr Brierley said. The low amount of fuel in the tank and its cargo meant there were fewer fears about its impact on the environment, he said. “There was only 500 litres of diesel on the truck, which is not a lot, so that made the job a lot easier,” Mr Brierley said. Hazmat crews were at the site of the crash for most of yesterday night and would check the area again when the truck was removed, he said.
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[Ed: Was the RTA recklessly culpable for the driver’s death?]
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FUND ESTABLISHED TO HELP FAMILYT OF DEAD TRUCKIE
The young family of the driver will be the recipients of a fund established by transport union officials.
“The man who died yesterday had a young family and what happened can only be described as a tragedy,” Transport Workers’ Union NSW secretary Wayne Forno said today. “The TWU is calling on all members to donate to a fund we are setting up for the man’s family, and Linfox has indicated they will match those donations. “But we are also calling for a full investigation into the incident, and for the coroner to examine how hyper-competitive road freight industry and the inadequate pay and conditions of truck drivers are contributing to more deaths on the road.”
A Linfox spokesman said the company did not comment on donations, but “conditionally we would match what colleagues contribute”.>>
<<There has heavy traffic on the F3 freeway north of Sydney after a truck caught on fire just before 11:00am AEDT today. The accident blocked all northbound lanes at Mount White, but traffic is now moving slowly after a lane was reopened. It is not yet known what caused the blaze.
Kate Martin was driving on the freeway when the accident happened. “It was on fire, really badly on fire, black smoke just streaming out of the truck,” she said. “It took a while for the police to arrive. It was burning for about 10 minutes before any services arrived.”>>
<<Commuters on the New South Wales Central Coast are being urged to delay their drive to Sydney after a crash involving a semi-trailer and several cars on the F3 freeway, near Mount White.
The Ambulance Service says two women and a teenage girl are in a stable condition in hospital after the accident. Roads and Traffic Authority spokesman Alec Brown says all three southbound lanes are blocked and traffic is backed up for three kilometres.
Mr Brown says it is not known how long it will take to clear the accident. “It’s impossible to predict. It really does depend on how smoothly it goes,” he said. “We’ve removed one truck already. We’re working on the rest of the vehicles and that’s something we’re doing as a priority.”
Traffic is being diverted onto the Old Pacific Highway.>>
Motorway Widening CancerRoad Widening is a Chicken and Egg causality dilemma – widen it and they shall come and then congest it, so widen it again…
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<<It doesn’t matter who’s right in this situation. The bigger problem has been the failure of the Australian government for setting unrealistic freight rail goals for Port Botany.
After setting a goal of shipping 40 percent of all Port Botany cargo by rail, the Australian government has dropped its target to 28 percent
“’Forty per cent was unrealistic and unachievable and typified Labor’s propensity to pluck figures out of the air,” the Transport Minister, Gladys Berejiklian, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
The increased number of trucks on the road is already causing considerable delays for motorists. Last Friday, one semi-trailer jack-knifed across one highway, according to the Herald, causing a traffic jam roughly 5 miles long.>>
Crushed between two large trucks on the Great Western Highway
Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia
[Photo by Top Notch Video, Blue Mountains Gazette, 20130213, p.9]
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The Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains west of Sydney is becoming an increasingly dangerous thoroughfare as the New South Wales Government steadily transforms it into a faster expressway designed for larger trucks and increasing the B-Double menace.
This highway is a regional route to towns like Bathurst and Orange and passes through many small towns and villages. Yet the trucking lobby and State Government don’t care about local safety or amenity. The wider and faster expressway is just carved through each town and village in turn, preventing safe crossing, dividing communities and prioritising the commercial imperatives of express road freight over human lives.
Hardly a week goes by without the local newspaper, the Blue Mountains Gazette, reporting a serious collision along our Great Western Highway.
All too frequently such collisions occur on the already widened expressway sections that are sold to the community as ‘safety upgrades’. All too frequently across the State and the country, we read about collisions on these expressways that have involved trucks – trucks speeding, trucks tailgating, trucks exceeding weight limits, drunk or drugged up truck drivers under the pressure of unrealistic delivery deadlines all hours of the day and night.
Local people who use these regional roads are now forced to confront larger and faster trucks, and B-doubles with trailers, hurtling along nudging above increased speed limits brought in by government planners. Ordinary road users are now risking the lives of themselves and their passengers as they are forced to increasingly share regional roads with the B-Double Menace.
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Get out of my way! I’m on an unrealistic deadline!
(The B-Double Menace)
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Just over a week ago, on the Great Western Highway at Blackheath, a Sydney woman driving in her car mid Wednesday morning toward the town of Orange braked behind a large truck that suddenly stopped on the highway in front of her. She glanced in the rear vision mirror only in horror to see a second large truck bearing down on her at speed. It slammed in to the back of her car, pushing her car compressed up against the large truck in front of her.
The woman, 34 year-old Sarina Heta was sandwiched in contorted metal that was her car, unable to escape and lucky to be alive. Her wrecked car, a Kia Rio sedan, is shown in the top photo.
Ms Heta was trapped in her car in a state of shock for 45 minutes until rescued by and the Fire Brigade and paramedics.
<<Blue Mountains emergency services were called to the scene about 10.50am where they found the woman trapped in her car. She was treated by ambulance officers while other emergency services workers spent an anxious 45 minutes working to safely remove her from the vehicle. Ms Heta was flown by helicopter to Westmead Hospital where she was in a stable condition and already reflecting on her miraculous survival.>>
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“I remember just taking a big breath and taking the steering wheel and actually thinking it was over for me. I was a lucky girl that day with a group of angels looking over me. I just keep thinking, I must have done something good, or I have to do something amazing now I have another chance.” said Ms Heta.
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Ed: This poor woman. It is plainly unjust that ordinary road users should have to experience life-threatening encounters with dangerous trucks.
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So why did the first truck stop on the highway?
More importantly, why didn’t the second truck stop safely?
Was the truck driver distracted talking on his mobile phone as many of these drivers frequently are observed, without being caught?
Is the bastard still driving?
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There are few if any police patrolling the highway. There is only one speed camera on the Great Western Highway and that is at Warrimoo over 30km away. These truck drivers are cowboys racing through the Blue Mountains as if they’re on a raceway and they couldn’t care less about any other road users. Other road users just get in their way.
Ordinary Blue Mountains road users have constantly complained about truck driver behaviour along the Great Western Highway; yet the State Government, local politicians and the police do nothing.
One resident wrote on social media: “The trucks very rarely travel at 60km through the town. . . There is no point trying to out run them as they are more powerful and you end up exceeding the speed limit,” wrote Alex Michie. “The road is fine . . . it’s the halfwits driving on it that is the problem,” wrote Josh Steel.
Many of these large B-Double trucks cart sand, soil or rock into Sydney from quarry sites located in the Central West region of New South Wales. But when they are empty travelling out of Sydney, they rip along speeding over 90kph and tail-gating at all hours, menacing other road users.
A root cause of the truck speeding problem is that the truck drivers themselves are not paid by the hour. The transport industry remuneration structure has long surrendered Award-based pay for individual pay contracts. Truck drivers get paid not an hourly rate, but by the trip rate. The more trips a driver does, the more the driver gets paid, so speed has become a motivator for more pay.
This may make the job costing easier for the company accountants of the trucking companies or the corporate clients of the trucking companies, but it encourages unreasonably fast driving incentives which has dangerous implications for all road users, and the government allowing this must be held largely responsible and culpable.
Past local politician for the Blue Mountains, Bob Debus, approved hundreds of millions be spent transforming the regional highway into a trucking expressway a decade ago. This remains the State Government’s agenda.
Yet the Great Western Highway passes through twenty-one local communities over the Blue Mountains between the end of the M4 Motorway in outer Sydney and Lithgow, a road distance of 87km.
Lapstone
Glenbrook
Blaxland
Warrimoo
Valley Heights
Springwood
Faulconbridge
Linden
Woodford
Hazelbrook
Lawson
Bullaburra
Wentworth Falls
Leura
Katoomba
Medlow Bath
Blackheath
Mount Victoria
Hartley
Little Hartley
Old Bowenfels
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Many of these communities also have families and in many cases local schools. Many of these communities have their own 60kph maximum speed zones to allow for local street access, local traffic and indeed pedestrians of all ages. Many school crossings and school 40kph speed zones exist along the Great Western Highway. The encouragement of a 80kph trucking expressway transformation of the Great Western Highway is incongruent with its local use.
In some cases the government’s trucking expressway transformation of the highway has completely divided communities to the extent that there is no sign that a community even exists. When it was their turn, the communities of Lapstone and Linden succumbed entirely to the expressway imperative. Other communities are denied local vehicle access or access that is so contorted as to have made the local communities second rate citizens, like Warrimoo and now parts of Wentworth Falls.
When the expressway juggernaut came through town in Leura, Medlow Bath and Katoomba eight years or so ago, local properties were inundated by flash flooding caused directly by redirected highway stormwater design.
Recently Lawson and Hazelbrook have been witness to the bulldozing of heritage and amenity as the four lanes lobotomised their villages into a 80kph Blaxland byway.
As the expressway juggernaut arrives it carves through more native vegetation and habitat.
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Destruction in progress at Boddington Hill in early 2012, east of Wentworth FallsGreat Western Highway, Blue Mountains, NSW
(Photo by Editor 20120201, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)
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Bullaburra residents sensibly got involved in the expressway process early, drafted their own re-design for their community and thought that had a special deal with the RTA-come-RMS. But although the clever Government consultants have listened, the RTA has got its way. The trucks will be able to set their cruise control to nudge 85kph through this bucolic Bullaburra..
The trucking companies would like to minimise their transit times across the Blue Mountains, simply because in transport, time is money.
A recent trucking strategy has been to introduce bigger trucks so that more can be carted by each driver. This is why the Blue Mountains has seen a steady increase in B-Doubles – rigid trucks with a bogie trailer. On designated motorways in New South Wales, these B-Doubles are 26 metres long. In western Victoria and South Australia, B-Triples have been allowed, basically equating to the Road Trains of Outback Australia.
Also, most of these newer trucks have more powerful turbo diesel engines so that they can travel faster with the increased gross weights.
The 87km Blue Mountains section of the Great Western Highway lies between the end of the M4 Motorway at Emu Plains where trucks can sit on 110kph and Lithgow, where the highway opens up to 100kph passing by very few communities.
It is this populated variable speed 87km section that is the bane of the trucking companies and so their lobbying target to government to transform it into a trucking expressway to serve them. If the designated average travel time over the 87km Blue Mountains section is say 1 hour and 20 minutes, the cumulative billions being spent to transform the Great Western Highway into a trucking expressway could at the absolute best expect to save just 20 minutes truck transit time. This is even if all traffic lights and pedestrian crossings were removed so that the trucks could cruise on 90kph, through this Blue Mountains section.
Cost benefit analysis? Has it been done by anybody?
The proposed Mount Victoria bypass is set to cost over a billion dollars alone, to save perhaps just 2 minutes truck transit time.
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The crazy planning Elephant in the Room that has been ignored in the wake of all these billions, is that once the trucks arrive in metropolitan Sydney, their transit times blow out in the congestion.
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Our Editor wrote the following article which was published in the local Blue Mountains Gazette 7th January 2009. It is pertinent, because within a 100 metres or so of the truck collision that impacted Sarina Heta this month, another woman, Blackheath resident Betty Dowdell, was not so lucky.
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Faster trucks Bob?
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<<Blackheath resident Betty Dowdell was hit and run by a semi last month less than a truck length from Blackheath’s main intersection [SMH 16/12/08]. On 18th November a B-double caused a pile up on Richmond Road. Drug utensils were allegedly found in the driver’s compartment [SMH 19/11/08].
On 24 July around 3pm between Lawson and Bullaburra a Volvo B-double driver “lost control of the vehicle and collided head-on with a white light goods van heading west.” The 56-year-old Leura man driving the van was killed. [BMG 30/7/08].
On 3 October at 9.15am, a motorcyclist collided head-on with a semi-trailer on the wrong side of the Bells Line of Road at Mt Tomah [AAP 4/10/08]. On 29 March last year, a semi driver over-turned at Mt Vic. In 2004, on 25 February at 11pm a semi laden with mixed chemicals failed to negotiate a sharp bend at the bottom of Mt Vic pass. The truck rolled, killing the driver and spilling a load of hydrochloric acid and herbicide.
I recall driving back from Mt Tomah a few years ago with my family. An oncoming truck was well over the double lines and I was forced onto the gravel shoulder to avoid a head-on.
Speeding traffic is making our two highways more dangerous. Highway patrols and speed cameras are almost non-existent in the Mountains. Many collisions occur on sections of the highway that are already four lanes. Government policies are encouraging more, and bigger trucks to drive faster while rail options remain ignored.
Why is our federal member Bob Debus MP encouraging faster trucks through the Mountains?>>
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Just because highways are transformed into expressways, doesn’t make them safer.
This is the six-laned M4 motorway at Emu Plains.
A truck driver not concentrating, wiped out and killed cyclists out for a ride in the cycle lane.
10th April 2010.
May they rest in peace.
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Footnote
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On the other side of the M4 motorway from the above cyclist collision at Emu Plains, but this time heading east, a cyclist in the cycle lane was hit and killed by a car.
Blue Mountains resident, Marc Simone, 43, was cycling in the cycle lane at 7:30am Saturday 16th February 2013, when an incompetent P-plater veered and hit and killed Marc.
Marc had been training to cycle over 3,900 km to Darwin to raise money for Mission Australia.
[Source: ‘Marathon Mission Ends in Tragedy’, 20130220, journalist B.C. Lewis, Blue Mountains Gazette newspaper, p.1]
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[Ed: Any highway, motorway or road that has ‘cycle lanes’ are death traps unless there is a concrete barrier keeping reckless and incompetent vehicle drivers killing cyclists.]
B-Double truck plying the Great Western Highway
New South Wales, Australia
(Photo by Editor 20121005, free in public domain, click image to enlarge)
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It’s all about trucks, bigger trucks, more trucks.
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An Innocuous Announcement
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The government of the State of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia late last month announced its plans to rename New South Wales’ major roads, highways, freeways and tollways under an alpha-numeric rebranding, akin to the British road numbering system.
Its ‘Alpha Numeric Route Marker Project‘ will affect more than 60 routes across NSW identified for the upgrade at a forecast cost of around $20 million. The delegated agency, the NSW Roads and Maritime Services (the rebranded ‘Roads and Traffic Authority’), is to roll out this new system of highway route numbering between March and December 2013.
[Source: ‘Have Your Say’, Bang the Table Pty Ltd (ACN 127 001 236) – a public relations consultancy outsourced by the NSW Government to deal with communities (voters) ^http://haveyoursay.nsw.gov.au/road-route-markers]
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The new system will include a combination of letters and numbers between 1 and 99.
Well, in the case of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains (formerly called the Western Road) it will lose its historically familiar name and be rebranded the rather clinical and characterless ‘A32‘.
Instead of people travelling along the famous Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains, they will simply follow the rather nondescript ‘A32‘, which will sound no different to the ‘A31‘ or the ‘A33‘, wherever they are?
Clinical and characterless trunk routing in the UK
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Removing the ‘Great Western Highway‘ name will erase its historical meaning to travellers – the oldest highway into inland Australia. The highway journey itself will supplanted by getting from A to B, as fast as possible. The Blue Mountains used to be a destination, but is steadily being transformed into a route from Sydney on the A32 to other destinations further west. So much for the tourism upon which so many Blue Mountains folk so vitally depend.
Grose Valley, Blue Mountains
(Photo by Editor 20060625, free in public domain)
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..What Blue Mountains? Where? Oh! Was that them?
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As the highway is widened and transformed into a trucking expressway, the Blue Mountains from the highway is looking urban just like Sydney. The Blue Mountains as a destination is steadly fading into another fast transit route into and out of Sydney, like the F3.
It is quite contradictory for the NSW Roads Minister, Duncan Gay, to promise that the road routes will retain their regular name, along with their new alpha-numeric designation. Why spend $20 million to rebrand the regular road naming with alpha-numeric road naming, only to retain the regular naming? The current road naming already displays the route number, as evidenced by the Route ‘32‘ symbol on the current Great Western Highway sign below. So why change it?
Great Western Highway across the Blue Mountains
(National Trucking Route 32)
(Photo by Editor 20121005, free in public domain)
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But the alpha numeric road renaming is clearly more than just renaming. It is ‘road rebranding‘ as a first phase of the government’s ‘road reclassification‘ strategy. It is one thing to upgrade a regional highway like the Great Western Highway; it is quite blue sky to reclassify it into a ‘Route of National Significance‘.
The alpha numeric road renaming is a precursor to reclassifying the Great Western Highway as an ‘A’ grade route of national significance, which is what the Hume Freeway is. Reclassification sets the precedent for the highway over the Mountains to bve upgraded to the likes of the Hume, if goivernmenyt so wishes. Both will be deemed A’ grade routes of national significance. It is a one size fits all approach from the urbane big brother in Macquarie Street.
This announced road renaming will follow a policy trend interstate in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia and so will be consistent with these adjoining states. NSW will mirror the road numbering system in Britain which has established ‘trunk roads‘ as designated long distance trucking routes interconnecting cities, ports and airports.
This road rebranding is about facilitating national trucking linehaul across state borders. It is all about encouraging more road freight across the country. For line-haul trucking, the aim is getting from A to B, as fast as possible. The slower the road journey, the higher the freight cost.
British Motorways: conceived, designed and built principly for road freight
[Source: ‘FTA man joins DfT for lorry charge development’, 20121004, by Chris Tindall, ^http://www.commercialmotor.com/latest-news/fta-s-ch, accessed 20121005]
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But the NSW Government’s official selling point is that its alpha numeric road rebranding is all so that motorists have “a better way to navigate NSW roads”. “It will be a more intuitive way for road users to navigate around NSW. These changes will help simplify journeys, making them safe, efficient and enjoyable.”
According to the RTA-RMS, the upgrade of the Great Western Highway is to ‘improve road safety’, ‘improve road freight efficiency’, ‘cater for the mix of through, local and tourist traffic and ‘be sensitive to the area’s natural environment, heritage and local communities.’ [Source: ^http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/roadprojects/projects/great_western_hway/index.html]
However, one suspects given the RTA-RMS’s arrogant track record of its expressway bulldozing through roadside vegetation and local communities, that the primary mission is one-eyed to ‘improve road freight efficiency’. The other aims are merely for RTA-RMS public relations tricky appeasement, freeing up the expressway engineers to proceed business-as-usual.
Great Western Highway bulldozed out to four lanes at Katoomba
(Photo by The Habitat Advocate 20090501, free in public domain)
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The NSW Government persuasive language is that the alpha numeric rebranding is to ‘standardise the system’, to end the confusion between states, to identify road corridors ‘in order of their importance‘ and so ‘make it easier for motorists to know if they are travelling on a motorway or a route of national or state significance as they plan their trip.’ In any case the Government’s additional quip is that well road signs in NSW have not been reviewed for 30 years, so that is a valid reason to do so.
Trunk Route 32 starts from industrial areas and is designed purely to route trucking
The Route numbering designation has nothing to do with ordinary motorists; such association is political spin.
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But why do ordinary motorists need to know whether a road has national or state significance? The route numbers are already there on the current road signs across the State.
The NSW Opposition has dismissed this project as a ‘colossal waste of money that won’t save motorists a single minute in travel time or improve road conditions and safety.’ At the same time the NSW Opposition claims ‘motorists of this State want new roads, less congestion and better road conditions..‘ [Source: ‘New road names a colossal waste of money’, 20120927, by John Robertson, Robert Furolo, ^http://www.nswalp.com/media/news/new-road-names-a-colossal-waste-of-money/]
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Alpha-Numeric Renaming – a precursor to more Trucking Expressways
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Could there indeed be another reason for embarking on a $20 million road rebranding project? Is the rebranding in fact a precursor to legislating for B-double trucks to ply regional roads where they are currently prohibited?
It is one thing to upgrade a regional highway like the Great Western Highway; it is quite ‘blue sky’ to reclassifying a regional highway like the Great Western Highway into a ‘Route of National Significance‘.
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Ed:
This road re-branding is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ edict for uniformity. It serves to abet trucking lobbyists, to befit centralist bureaucrats, while de-personalising local communities in the process. It is a strategic precursor to rolling out more Trucking Expressways. It reeks of rancid Babyboomerism – the self-entitlement, the moral relativism, the utilitarianism, oil-dependent industries…all cultural throwbacks to the exploitative 20th Century. Die off, history beckons!
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Such reclassification facilitates central government roughshodding of legitimate local community concerns about the adverse and permanent impacts. When the RTA-RMS wants to bulldoze its trucking expressways through local communities, the legal reclassification overrides concerns about the impacts on environment, amenity, land values, equity and access. It is a prejudiced arrogant policy undermining local democratic rights.
The scheme is inherited from the recent NSW Government centralist planning policy that designated projects of State Significance and Projects of National Signifiance. In 2005, the NSW Government conceived its autocratic State Environmental Planning Policy (Major Projects) then in March 2006 imposed its ‘NSW Major Projects Assessment System‘ upon the people of NSW. It was all to ‘remove unnecessary red tape’, ‘clarify the assessment of major projects’, and ‘help NSW remain Australia’s economic powerhouse.’ [Ed: Sometimes spin can be so poetic]
It became known as Part 3A – a new part of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 (EP&A Act) that simply overruled all other parts. Easy!
Under this planning policy and amended planning legislation, if the NSW Government deemed an infrastructure project to be of ‘State Significance’, then local council objections would be automatically overruled and community protests discarded. The State’s Planning Minister would have ultimate say supposedly in the State’s interest to allow the project to proceed and to roughshod all social impacts and all environmental impacts. It was a return to autocracy, just like in the days of kings and queens ruling over serfs and peasants.
But now for a road to be deemed a ‘Route of National Significance’ (i.e. get the ‘A’ branding), well, local communities will have even less of a voice.
The policy is absolute Putinesk (neo-‘Stalinist’).
Goodbye Bullaburra – set to be the next victim of the Trucking Expressway
(Photo by Editor 20120103, free in public domain, this is a photo for the historical record)
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This alpha numeric road renaming is ‘road rebranding‘ and the first phase of the government’s ‘road reclassification‘ strategy. It is part of a broader road centric freight agenda that ignores the demonstrable long-term and future-resilient benefits of rail freight nationally.
Reclassifying the Great Western Highway into the A32 Road of National Significance achieves more than upgrading the regional highway to a four-lane trucking expressway, all so that thousands of B-doubles can nudge 90kph on cruise control. The Road of National Significance is national trucking route policy. It will see the 1950’s conceived National Route 32 from Sydney 1154km to Cockburn on the South Australian Border and extend well beyond to Adelaide, Perth and Darwin.
It is 1950s mindset applied in 2013. It is all about facilitating interstate freight by 25 metre long B-Double trucks.
Trunk Route 32, somewhat further west The distance sign heading east from the NSW/SA Border at Cockburn
This is now the western terminus of National Route 32 following the implementation of alpha-numeric route marking in South Australia, Jan 2005.
[Source: ^http://www.ozroads.com.au/NSW/RouteNumbering/National%20Routes/32/nr32.htm]
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Meanwhile, hectare after hectare of Blue Mountains native vegetation is bulldozed to make way for the ‘Trucking Expressway‘.
Wentworth Falls bushland amenity disappearing for the Trucking Expressway
(Photo by Editor 20120201, free in pubic domain, click image to enlarge)
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Meanwhile, Australian wildlife slaughtered as roadkill is perpetuated and ignored by the RTA-RMS to make way for the ‘Trucking Expressway‘.
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Meanwhile, just because the road is wider and faster, humans are not exempt from becoming ‘roadkill’ either.
All we need do is look at Britain, its road-freight centric policy and its consequential trucking carnage legacy.
Trucking Expressways kill local communities in more ways than one
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Meanwhile, the ongoing trucking carnage legacy continues along already upgraded sections of the Great Western Highway:
[Source: “Frightening” figures released’, by journalist Krystyna Pollard, 20110914, Blue Mountains Gazette (newspaper), p.7]
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[Source: ‘Gone too soon’, by journalist Damien Madigan, 20110914, Blue Mountains Gazette (newspaper), p.1]
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[Source: ‘Highway mayhem’, by journalist Shane Desiatnik, 20110803, Blue Mountains Gazette (newspaper), p.1]
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Linehaul Trucking and pedestrians don’t mixTrucking Economics does not overrule!
[Source: Blue Mountains Gazette (newspaper]
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Speeding B-Double overturned at Lapstone on an already widened 4-laned section of the converted Trucking Expressway
[Source Blue Mountains Gazette, 20110729]
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What is preventing B-Triples bidding for access to Roads of National Significance?
Last week: B-Double fuel truck driver fell asleep at the wheel through Medlow Bath
This Ron Finemore’s driver fell asleep at the wheel of this dangerous B-Double fully laden with petrol, while hurtling through Medlow Bath.
[Source: Photo by Len Ashworth, Lithgow Mercury, 20130512,
^http://www.bluemountainsgazette.com.au/story/1500162/lucky-escape-for-truck-driver/?cs=12]
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His job is currently advertised: ^http://www.ronfinemoretransport.com.au/career-opportunities [>Read More.pdf ]
Different head-on collision, but similar consequence
[Source: Photo by Richard Polden, Perth Now
^http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/motorist-trapped-after-car-truck-head-on-in-bullsbrook/story-e6frg13u-1226111010848]
B-Doubles Out of Control
Dec 2010: Ballina, NSW – a multiple vehicle crash caused by a truck over the centre line
[Source: ^http://www.northernstar.com.au/news/trucks-crash-bangalow-road/712289/]
Truck explodes on Hume Freeway near Berrima
Nothing Left
B-Double Cattle Truck crash kills livestock, injured cattle are shot
Photo by Moree Champion
Truck Crash at the corner of Roger St and Old Pittwater Rd Brookvale, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches
[Photo by Cameron Mitch, The Sunday Telegraph]
No chance at Ki Ki, South Australia
B-Double rollover on the Cunningham Hwy at Maryvale
A crash on the M4 freeway closed both lanes of traffic
[Source: Picture by Gregg Porteous, The Daily Telegraph]
Truck on Fire on Hume Highway, near Yerrinbool
B-Double Rolled on Ballimore Highway near Dubbo
Fire erupted in the trailers of the two trucks after they crashed on the Hume Highway near Yass
[Photo by ABC News]
Police gather evidence after a pedestrian was killed in a hit-run in Reservoir (Melbourne)
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McColl’s Milk Tanker slams at speed into a Parramatta Road cafe on the corner of Croydon Road, Croydon
Milk Truck approach on eastbound side of Parramatta Road toward the Croydon Road intersection. Looking east along Parramatta Road toward the Croydon Road cafe (circled)
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More lanes and more trucks are making our highways more dangerous.
[Image construct via Google Maps, before the crash]
B-Double McColl’s milk truck over the double lines kills Countrylink bus driver on the Gwyder Highway in February 2012.
[Source: Photo by Debrah Novak, The Daily Examiner, from article ‘Fatal crash on Gwydir’, 20120210, Coffs Coast Advocate, ^http://www.coffscoastadvocate.com.au/news/fatal-bus-and-truck-accident/1267856/]
Sad Sight: Blue Mountains resident Aanya Mary
devastated by the senseless slaughter of Bullaburra’s Angophora
Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia
