Welcome back Cotter: Four lanes give drivers smooth ride

What do we reckon about the new Cotter Road then? There’s some resurfacing at night this week but in the day all the new lanes are open. Morning rush hour isn’t real good. Everyone trying to get from two lanes to one at Adelaide Av. What’s the fix? Is anyone working on one?

This has been a debacle from a planning perspective from day one. They built a brand new two lane section but did not put the gutters in so dug up a small slice along the whole length of it, put the gutters in then had to re-seal that slice. That has happened again now on the “old” section towards Molonglo and only now have they started building the bike path near North Weston that will impact on traffic flow until it is completed. A number of traffic islands that could have been completed early in the project are also not complete and the top of the sound wall, potentially the longest and fiddliest part of the project has not been started so will also impact on traffic flow. Sadly far too typical of new roads design and build in Canberra, don’t get me started on the bloody debacle of the access into Majura Park from the Monaro Highway.

I was trying to follow the blog guidelines, you know, be positive. In fact general driver behaviour in Canberra is disgusting as you witnessed with me yesterday.

I drove from Deakin to Weston at 3.00pm today via the “new” Cotter Rd road widening. It took me 30 minutes – it was absolutely chaotic with no traffic control. The speed limit was 60 kmh dropping to 40 kmh when two lanes turned into one approaching the Tuggeranong Parkway flyover which became gridlocked with southbound Parkway traffic coming of the ramp to turn right over the crossover which was reduced to one lane also. Fortunately, one of the workman could see what was happening and he removed the traffic cones single-handedly on the crossover to clear the jam.

The four lanes may be open but there is still a lot of work (and traffic planning) to be done.

Seeing how good the surface is it will probably now be good for some 100km/h plus runs from Weston/Denman Prospect towards the city, subject to traffic light sequencing.

Well done Huon for a good job and active interest in looking after all users. Next step is to figure out how to extend this new capacity past Yarralumla into Adelaide Avenue and merge into Northbound Tuggers Parkway. Both are bottlenecks in rush hour and bound to get worse as Molongolo expands.