This is the 11th in a series of essays by journalist Bradley Perrett on long-term planning ideas to provide for a better future for the people of Greater Newcastle and the Hunter Region.
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The NSW government says building the first line to extend Newcastle's light rail service is not urgent - and that's right, because the city has no pressing problem with road congestion.
What is urgent is producing a completely new long-term light-rail plan - because the current one is intolerable. It's a strategy for crushing car travel in our most densely populated suburbs.
Five major roads radiate from the West End, which is now Newcastle's central business district. Mostly thanks to superb state planning just after World War II, these routes provide such excellent connections that a city of Newcastle's size could hardly ask for more.
But today's state planners would like to give it less, much less.
Based on what can only be an anti-car mentality, the light-rail plan proposes to cripple the traffic capacity of four of those roads: each is supposed to sacrifice space for cars so it can take tram tracks.
Part of the problem is that modern tram lines are road hogs: design practice no longer favours the sharing of lanes by trams and cars, and safety often requires platforms at stops.
So putting a tram line on a road these days at least means removing turning lanes, so intersections become clogged, or, if there's space for widening, taking away potential for adding lanes later.
At worst, it means reducing a four-lane, high-capacity road to a constricted street with one lane in each direction. And traffic is further impeded when it must stop for tram passengers to cross the road.
There is, however, a way to get light-rail lines into our suburbs without crippling major roads: building the lines through residential streets. This would have drawbacks, but they would be well worth accepting to preserve traffic capacity.
We don't need imagination to understand what the state proposes to do to our major roads; we can see it today in Hunter Street.
Formerly offering four traffic lanes and two parking lanes, most of the old main street is now reduced to one traffic lane in each direction and, here and there, just a bit of parking.
Now think of such mutilation being inflicted on Maitland Road or the main thoroughfare through Hamilton to Broadmeadow and New Lambton, which is what the state government proposes.
In its vision, a tram line would hobble even the Pacific Highway on the ridge to Charlestown, and another would debilitate the central trunk of inner Newcastle, the route from Hamilton to Wallsend.
The issue is not just access to the city centre - far from it. We mostly use these major roads for travelling from suburb to suburb. If the current tram plan goes ahead, getting around inner Newcastle by car will be a misery.
If the current tram plan goes ahead, getting around inner Newcastle by car will be a misery.
If, on the other hand, the light-rail extensions are built through residential streets, travelling in inner Newcastle will be more convenient, because trams will carry some people who would otherwise drive.
Like other subjects addressed in this series of articles, this is a long-term issue that needs thinking about now, because future Novocastrians will depend on land that we reserve for them.
One earlier article in the series pointed out that the autonomous vehicle revolution, whenever it arrives, will undercut demand for public transport in Newcastle. But as the population and density rise, we'll nonetheless need trams eventually.
Transport planner Garry Glazebrook estimates that when the population of Greater Newcastle has risen to 800,000, from about 600,000 now, it will justify two light-rail extensions from Newcastle Interchange.
At 1 million, which he thinks we will reach well before the end of the century, the city will need four light-rail extensions.
The accompanying map shows my proposal for back-street alternatives to the government's four routes.
For each of the alternatives, some demolition would be needed. None is as straight as an arterial road.
The government intends first to build a line to John Hunter Hospital, laying tracks along the major thoroughfare from the West End to New Lambton and up the hill to the hospital. Incredibly, consultants who recommended this route as the first one to build also found that Russell Road, New Lambton, might have to be closed to traffic.
You read that right: an intensively used urban road might not just be reduced in capacity; it could be closed altogether.
Don't blame the consultants. The state government gave them four hopeless light-rail options to assess; the hospital route just happened to be the best (or least worse).
The alternative Hospital Line proposed in this article would run from Newcastle Interchange along Denison Street to Nineways, where it would cross to Broadmeadow Station then follow Perth Road near McDonald Jones Stadium, itself an important destination.
The line would need to cross the main thoroughfare again to access New Lambton, where it would have to make turns at the shops.
Finally, the trams would climb Portland Road and Curzon Street to reach the hospital.
A critical piece of land must be reserved for this, however: 880-888 Hunter Street, which is needed for a path between the interchange and Denison Street.
The minimum requirement is a tram passage through any new building on that land.
If trams do not get access to Denison Street, they will have to use Tudor Street, crippling its traffic capacity.
Newcastle state MP Tim Crakanthorp has been worried that even access to Tudor Street could be imperiled by high-rise development on Hunter Street.
In reply to a question that Crakanthorp arranged to have asked in the Legislative Council, the government said it and Newcastle City Council would review any development proposals that would affect the route.
Crakanthorp says: "It is imperative that a transport corridor be preserved for the light rail moving forward."
Indeed, but not the Tudor Street corridor, I suggest.
As for the Mayfield Line, the proposed alternative would go through the middle of Maryville and Tighes Hill, because those splendidly located suburbs will probably be densely populated in the future.
But if serving the Islington shops is seen as more important, the route could run along residential streets on the northeastern side of Maitland Road and through Islington Park.
For a City-Wallsend connection, a line should head west along Cleary Street and through the showground site, which will be redeveloped and could be integrated with the trams.
This Wallsend Line would also well serve McDonald Jones Stadium, Lambton shops and Jesmond Central.
Then there's the Charlestown Line. No back-street route running parallel to the Pacific Highway on the ridge is available: no sequence of residential streets can be joined together, and the terrain is dreadful.
To go that way, the only path is the highway corridor, which is also unacceptable.
It's a bad route for a tram service, anyway, because it has no important destinations except the two at its ends.
But we can use some of our heritage of coal railways to build a much better route, though also a costlier one. As the map shows, the Charlestown Line could instead split from the Hospital Line at Broadmeadow and run on its own tracks on the heavy rail corridor to the retail centre at Kotara, which is supposed to be a major growth centre.
From there it could follow the old Waratah Coal Company's Gully Line, now mostly a reserve, to Raspberry Gully (Kotara South, where the company had a mine).
Then there's just a short climb to the town centre of Charlestown. It's also a steep climb, however, so costly work would be needed to reduce the slope.
