23 February 2012

Parkes Way widening kicks off

| johnboy
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Chief Minister Gallagher has announced she’s calling for tenders to widen Parkes Way from the Glenlock Interchange to Edinburgh Avenue.

The Parkes Way widening project, which is due to commence in May 2012, will see the construction of a third lane in each direction from Glenloch Interchange to Edinburgh Avenue.

“This is a great project set to benefit all Canberrans; both those from the south who currently use the Tuggeranong Parkway and those from the north and west who use William Hovell Drive and the GDE to get onto Parkes Way,” the Chief Minister said.

“Parkes Way carries over 35,000 vehicles a day travelling from the south of Canberra and Belconnen through to the City and beyond toward the airport.

“With increased residential development in areas such as Molonglo Valley and Gungahlin, the volume of traffic is forecast to increase to 40,000 vehicles a day by 2016.

Work will also be undertaken to improve the Parkes Way on-ramp to Commonwealth Avenue by increasing the length of the merging lane with London Circuit southbound traffic. New street lighting will also be installed along the route.


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knee jerk reaction to this

http://the-riotact.com/just-how-bad-is-william-hovell-drive/66177

must be an election coming up

Thoroughly Smashed10:43 am 24 Feb 12

MrPC said :

What a waste. Tens of millions of dollars on two lanes, both of which will be largely useless for 23 1/2 hours a day.

Why not two tidal flow lanes that will only be useless for 23 hours a day?

Why bother building any roads at all?

Thoroughly Smashed10:42 am 24 Feb 12

gazket said :

why don’t AECOM just tattoo a bar code on our foreheads from birth. These people are Nazi’s sponging of our taxpaying dollars.

o_O

steveu said :

Can we trust the government to do any roadworks at all after it took them 7 years do do a 7km stretch of road?

Im all for infesting in infrastructure, but I thnk the community in general needs some assurances of how long they will contract the work to take once the tender is decided. And how long the disruption to their commute every day will be.

The ACT Government keeps awarding contracts to companies with a track record of doing amazingly slow work. I’m thinking of the roads around the airport. The part that the airport was responsible for was done quite quickly, especially when you think that they had a flyover and a whole stretch of road to re-locate. But the other part of the work, done by a company contracted by ACT Government, took years longer. The work would sit there untouched for literally months. Clearly there’s a big issue with the way the local government writes and runs its tender processes and how it “manages” its contracts.

And making the road fatter won’t fix the cause of the problem, which is bottlenecks. We have a fast-growing population, and the road system that has been so good for so long is buckling under the strain of badly-planned growth. There is clearly no planning beyond the locality where the growth is happening, no plotting of people and car movements and their effect on other localities.

And as is usual with population growth, the current residents will pay for the facilities enjoyed by the future residents.

winter said :

Great news. Would be a good possibility for a dedicated bus lane.

Givent he people moving capacity of a bus lane, I sure hope so. If not now, at least make sure it’s engineered so it can easily become a T2/T3 or exlcusive bus lane with just a few lane markings in the future.

Can we trust the government to do any roadworks at all after it took them 7 years do do a 7km stretch of road?

Im all for infesting in infrastructure, but I thnk the community in general needs some assurances of how long they will contract the work to take once the tender is decided. And how long the disruption to their commute every day will be.

thatsnotme said :

winter said :

Great news. Would be a good possibility for a dedicated bus lane.

Not sure if trolling or serious… If serious, you might want to look at how many bus services actually travel along Parkes Way. I’ll give you a hint – you could count them on one hand (with fingers to spare!)

If trolling, then stop it – don’t give them any more ideas!

I was thinking more to do with molongolo valley probably being completed at the same time as the widening. I whole new area to provide public transport for.

Extra lanes seems like an odd solution to me. Based on my observations, I thought the bottleneck was the two lanes extending from just before Edinburgh Avenue, terminating at the Coranderrk St. Roundabout. You could make it 8 lanes from the Glenloch Interchange, but unless the bottleneck at the city is dealt with, I don’t think anyone will be getting to work any quicker.

Well, to be pedantic, the widening will only go as far as the bridge over Clunies Ross Street, because after that point there already are three lanes to Edinburgh Avenue. Currently the issue is that city bound in the morning, cars heading up onto Parkes Way from Clunies Ross are able to travel much faster than the traffic on Parkes Way – so it’s hard to get into that lane from Parkes Way to exit, and at the same time cars are trying to merge over into Parkes Way to continue on.

In the evenings, you end up with cars stuck in the lane that heads down onto Lady Denman Drive, trying to merge over into the Parkes Way traffic.

If both these existing lanes turned into Parkes Way, with traffic from Clunies Ross having to merge onto Parkes Way, and traffic heading off having to actually exit their lane, this part of the road would be a lot easier to navigate.

Sandman said :

But 2 lanes of parkway still goes down to 1 lane to get through Glenloch doesn’t it? Or are they going to rebuild Glenloch for the 3rd time this century?

That single lane from the Parkway to Parkes Way seems to be coping quite well. That small section of road would have to be one of the smoothest for the entire drive along the Parkway into the City!

One thing that must be achieved in this widening, is two lanes of traffic to exit Glenloch with no need to do any further merging. The combination of cars merging into Glenloch from the GDE, before that lane again needs to merge on Parkes Way, turns that section of road into a mess.

This work won’t fix the bottlenecks that occur at the roundabouts further up (although the extension of the Commonwealth Avenue exit could be promising) – but at least it’s a start. I just hope they get a company tendering who can move faster than a glacier…

winter said :

Great news. Would be a good possibility for a dedicated bus lane.

Not sure if trolling or serious… If serious, you might want to look at how many bus services actually travel along Parkes Way. I’ll give you a hint – you could count them on one hand (with fingers to spare!)

If trolling, then stop it – don’t give them any more ideas!

What a waste. Tens of millions of dollars on two lanes, both of which will be largely useless for 23 1/2 hours a day.

Why not two tidal flow lanes that will only be useless for 23 hours a day?

Great news. Would be a good possibility for a dedicated bus lane.

The gridlock is caused by the correnderk st roundabout and the commonwealth ave on ramp and the merges off caswell dr, widening the road from the glenloch to the tunnel will do little to fix anything without fixing the roundabout and merges.

So it will be down to one lane for the duration of the road works? May as well make it a T2 !

hmm a wider road. I wonder if they will be sensible and put the limit up to 100 when it’s complete. Somehow I doubt it. Dropping it to 80 and sticking in cameras is more likely as posted earlier.

Sgt.Bungers said :

The same AECOM report that recommended point to point cameras on Hindmarsh Drive…

Point to point cameras on the GDE in conjunction with an 80 km/h speed limit…

Also recommend that point to point cameras be used on Parkes Way between Glenloch and Edinburgh Avenue… with an 80 km/h limit.

It’s almost certain that the Parkes Way limit will not be raised back to 90 km/h after the upgrade, and point to point cameras will follow.

Report can be found here

why don’t AECOM just tattoo a bar code on our foreheads from birth. These people are Nazi’s sponging of our taxpaying dollars.

If the guys who did the Russell Flyover win, we’ll have a five kilometer roller-coaster with no straight lines, which will be slower than before.

The same AECOM report that recommended point to point cameras on Hindmarsh Drive…

Point to point cameras on the GDE in conjunction with an 80 km/h speed limit…

Also recommend that point to point cameras be used on Parkes Way between Glenloch and Edinburgh Avenue… with an 80 km/h limit.

It’s almost certain that the Parkes Way limit will not be raised back to 90 km/h after the upgrade, and point to point cameras will follow.

Report can be found here

Grail said :

When you see traffic banked up to Tuggeranong Parkway, it’s because the traffic at the lights on Edinburgh Avenue/Marcus Clarke Street or Coranderrk/Constitution Ave is backed up.

Based on my experience the Edinburgh Ave exit doesn’t cause traffic to back up onto Parkes way. From what I’ve seen, the morning carpark scenario is in small way caused by the Coranderrk roundabout (as you mentioned), but largely because of the clusterf*ck road arrangement of the Eastbound connections for Edinburgh and Commonwealth avenues onto Parkes Way. Traffic using these lanes is forced to cross through the traffic that is trying to loop onto Commonwealth Avenue. This traffic banks into the left lane of Parkes way right into the tunnel, and as impatient drivers swing into the fast lane they cause that lane to slow dramatically too.

Similar situation in the afternoon where traffic exiting Commonwealth Avenue onto Parkes Way (westbound) is forced to tangle with traffic exiting Parkes Way onto Edinburgh Ave.

janoski said :

chewy14 said :

Finally.

You’re excited over more road works in Canberra.

How did you get excited out of my one word statement?
I would have gone with relieved or maybe exasperated.

As Grail says, this should remove the bottleneck through to Edinburgh Ave and the roundabout. Whether it makes it worse at the other end, I’m not so sure. Most of the time once you’re past this section, its pretty smooth traffic.
Although the government may try to turn one of the lanes into a bus lane in the future.

Sandman said :

But 2 lanes of parkway still goes down to 1 lane to get through Glenloch doesn’t it? Or are they going to rebuild Glenloch for the 3rd time this century?

The 1 lane between Glenloch and Parkes way is a long way from being a bottleneck. The bottleneck is the exit from Parkes way to Edinburgh Avenue, with a second minor bottleneck at the Coranderrk Street roundabout. Once those exits are sorted out, the single lane from Tuggeranong Parkway to Parkes Way might become an issue, but you’d need Parkes Way to be 4 lanes in each direction for that to happen.

When you see traffic banked up to Tuggeranong Parkway, it’s because the traffic at the lights on Edinburgh Avenue/Marcus Clarke Street or Coranderrk/Constitution Ave is backed up.

It might be interesting to have cameras on the road with a decent view of the Northern end of Tuggeranong Parkway so you can see the exits to Lady Denman Drive, William Hovell Drive/Parkes Way, recording simultaneously with cameras on the massive lane merging exercise on Parkes Way (where traffic enters from Caswell Drive, William Hovell Drive and Tuggeranong Parkway), and the exits onto Edinburgh and the Coranderrk roundabout. Then people could see in real time that the bloke who hit the skids and cut into the next lane to exit onto Edinburgh street caused the traffic on Parkes Way to stall for three minutes.

Just moving more traffic more quickly to the next bottleneck, and I guess giving more space for the slow-moving carpark that follows. And while the roadworks are happening, guess what’ll happen to that stretch of road? If they let Guideline anywhere near it, double the time they first gazette, too.

And they keep telling us how everything is better with population growth.

chewy14 said :

Finally.

You’re excited over more road works in Canberra.

But 2 lanes of parkway still goes down to 1 lane to get through Glenloch doesn’t it? Or are they going to rebuild Glenloch for the 3rd time this century?

Surely the road construction companies in this state have implanted their own patsy into the government planning division to ensure they get continued work due to the extreme lack of foresight.

Finally.

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