Lamenting a life lived in traffic snarls

I’ve lived in Sydney nearly all my life, and I can’t recall a time without traffic jams. I feel like I’ve lost entire years trapped in gridlock.

One hot Christmas night in the 1950s, I remember sitting with my sisters in the back seat of my father’s FJ Holden as we inched along the Princes Highway towards the aptly named Tom Ugly’s Bridge.

The trip home from my grandparents’ house seemed to take up half the night. I can hear my dad wishing aloud that he’d taken the "punt", but I knew from previous experience, as limited as it was then, that this option was both appalling and appealing.

He was talking about the car ferry that ran between Sans Souci and Taren Point. For a boy, the novelty of the punt made up for the hours-long queue.

Today, the wide Captain Cook Bridge crosses the Georges River at this point, and further upstream, a second road bridge runs next to Tom Ugly’s old Meccano set.

And the traffic flows, even on Christmas night. It is a rare success in Sydney’s constant battle to unclog its congested roads.

My father drove into the city every day along Grand Parade and General Holmes Drive, usually riding the clutch through a stop-start, jammed-up journey. It is much the same today.

Fast forward to the ’80s when I drove most days in peak hour from Balmain to the city. Sometimes a trip that normally lasted 15 minutes would take almost an hour, as three lanes merged into one across Glebe Island Bridge and Pyrmont Bridge.

Today, multi-laned engineering wonders have superseded both bridges, but the traffic still snails along. The story is similar all over Sydney. Old routes have been replaced with tunnels, motorways, tollways, bigger bridges, overpasses. There are more buses and more trains.

And more people driving more cars. Lots more. Still choking the roads.

In this issue, we explore some NRMA ideas that should clear the streets for the future.

It’s time to fix the jam. Finally. And forever.

David Naylor Editor-in-chief