This is the 15th in a series of essays by journalist Bradley Perrett on long-term planning ideas to provide a discussion about creating a better future for the people of Greater Newcastle and the Hunter Region.
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We are close to losing one of the great opportunities for future transportation in Greater Newcastle. The state government must intervene to protect it.
A route is available for a high-capacity road that would provide a superb link between inner Newcastle and the northern end of Lake Macquarie. But a reservation is urgently needed to ensure that part of the alignment is not built on.
The same road could and should extend down the western side of the lake to shift traffic away from the current route, which passes through suburbs. Eye-catchingly, it could connect to what everyone thinks is just a dream but actually should one day be possible: a cross-lake tunnel.
These roads would form elements of an arterial road system for growing suburbs on both sides of the lake. Next week's Hunter Essay will describe the eastern parts.
The theme of Hunter Essays is to consider the needs of future generations. This means thinking much further than the state government's ridiculously close 2036 horizon for general planning for Greater Newcastle - and far beyond even its 2056 limit for transportation planning.
We need to imagine not the current population of 600,000 but well over 1 million. And this expansion will include extension down the western side of the lake.
For example, the state government has identified a 300-hectare zone for housing release between Teralba and Fennell Bay. And Lake Macquarie City Council sees everything between there and the Edgeworth-Barnsley-Holmesville region as a "future growth investigation area" - a concept that will surely harden into a "definite growth area" as the decades roll on. That's maybe 2,000 hectares of more development land.
Further down the lake, the state plans to release parcels of land between Toronto and Arcadia Vale, and, as elsewhere in Greater Newcastle, regards almost all current residential area on the western side of the lake as ripe for densification.
Both governments see extensive development occurring around Morisset, and we can reasonably expect the state to identify more housing zones north of there later in the century.
This prospective urban expansion is far beyond what was imagined 70 years ago when planners devised our current main road from Wallsend to Morisset, the one with the route code B53. So the main proposal in today's Hunter Essay is planning a high-capacity parallel road that I'll call the West Lake Motorway.
It isn't needed now but can be built later in the century, probably in stages starting from the north.
The West Lake Motorway would provide freeway-standard convenience and as much north-south capacity as will ever be needed in its catchment area. Crucially, it would prevent suburbs such as Teralba, Fennell Bay and Toronto eventually becoming choked with through-traffic. An associated arterial road could loop through the contemplated development zone south of Barnsley.
The northern terminus of the West Lake Motorway would be at Wallsend; this would be an interchange with the Newcastle Link Road and, ideally, the Wallsend-Mayfield Arterial, construction of which was urged in an earlier Hunter Essay.
The section from there to Glendale is the part that urgently needs a reservation, because it passes through land that is proposed for residential development, the huge 592-hectare site of Eden Estates. This housing proposal is already moving ahead: Lake Macquarie City Council voted in May to endorse suitable rezoning of 169 hectares of the land.
My argument is that about 10 hectares, just 1.6% of the total, needs to be reserved for a road that future Novocastrians would regard as an essential urban asset. The state government should do this immediately.
Further south, the West Lake Motorway would need to pass through current development on either side of Main Road, requiring some demolition. The best path would follow Frederick Street then diverge to run through the eastern end of Argenton, where houses would have to make way.
The idea of a West Lake Motorway is not as extravagant as it seems, because our successors will be better able to afford such infrastructure: there will be more of them and they will be individually richer, paying more tax. We just need to make good plans and reserve land for them; they can build the road when they have enough money and enough traffic demand.
Two alternatives are unattractive: building the road over a nearby golf course and pretty creeks, or knocking down a larger number of houses in eastern Edgeworth.
As in many parts of Greater Newcastle, houses at Argenton probably have limited life expectancy. This makes it easier to reserve land there.
From Argenton, the proposed route crosses the railway to Boolaroo to avoid further housing demolition and for a connection to the eastern side of the lake (to be discussed next week).
As readers can see from the map, the rest of the route runs down the western side, staying mostly a few kilometres inland and bending to hug current and future urban areas. The exact path would depend on the terrain. Parts of the B53 alignment could be used.
Lake Macquarie City Council has noticed a ready-built opportunity for a similar route in this area: the Newstan-Eraring Private Coal Road. With commendable long-term vision that we don't get from the state government, the council says in its 2020 strategic planning statement that this road could eventually be used publicly.
A spokesperson says: "There is potential for the road's ownership to be passed to Council as part of future development proposals associated with mine closures and power station repurposing, but those discussions are yet to occur."
My view is that the coal road is not ideal for an arterial thoroughfare, which should be closer to lakeside suburbs to draw traffic away from the B53. I suggest the coal route will instead make a good local road for housing development one day.
The idea of a West Lake Motorway is not as extravagant as it seems, because our successors will be better able to afford such infrastructure: there will be more of them and they will be individually richer, paying more tax. We just need to make good plans and reserve land for them; they can build the road when they have enough money and enough traffic demand.
One reason for them choosing to build it would be deferring eventual widening of the Pacific Motorway north of Morisset. Much Greater Newcastle traffic would use the new road instead.
That could eventually include traffic going to and from the eastern side of the lake, using a tunnel between Toronto and Valentine.
We hardly need to discuss the benefits of such a tunnel: everyone in Newcastle has thought about this at one time or another. As an example, it would cut the trip from Croudace Bay to Toronto by about two-thirds in distance and much more in time. Still, we can all see such a tunnel cannot be justified in the next few decades, maybe not until late in the century.
Two weeks ago, Hunter Essays showed that a Newcastle Harbour Tunnel might be funded by the lift in land values it would create at Stockton. But neither side of the lake would gain anything like that effect from a Valentine-Toronto tunnel, at least not within a period we can estimate now.
Instead, the Lake Macquarie Tunnel is something that we should just plan for, and reserve land for, in the expectation that our successors will eventually want to build it because they'll have more money and because, with a greater population, they'll have more need for it.
We'll look at this further in next week's Hunter Essay.