Our President Tegan was recently quoted in the ABC pointing out that the designs for Fifteenth Avenue resemble nothing so much as an endless grey expanse of failed promises and bad planning.
Fifteenth Avenue is a road between Liverpool City and the new Western Sydney airport, running through West Hoxton, Middleton Grange and Austral. Liverpool Council has been planning, designing and consulting for nearly a decade to deliver a multimodal corridor, focused on the movement of people.
Rapid transit between Liverpool City and the airport was a commitment in the Western Sydney City Deal (2018), and the Federal government made an election promise (2025) alongside NSW Labor that Fifteenth Avenue will be a “transit corridor” to the airport.
Instead, Transport for NSW has released a plan for an uncrossable motorway, more than 50 metres wide at points, with no dedicated bus lanes, a substandard footpath on one side and a shared path on the other. A deferred Stage 2 with no delivery timeline includes a transitway (bus lanes) that would result in the demolition of 90 existing homes.
Now, it does matter that this is not the vision prepared by Council, but it matters more that this is a bad vision, a hellscape, completely unsuited to the future it inhabits, and contributing to the complex, highly networked problems we face.
The lack of transport options in much of Western Sydney is constantly cited by locals and government as a barrier to full participation in society, including employment. There have been two separate parliamentary inquiries in this term, entirely focused on public transport provision in Western Sydney and to the new airport. Those inquiries recommended that public transport must be prioritised for the people of Western Sydney, and those inquiries have been ignored.
Fifteenth Avenue is more of the same. It has been designed for one user only – large trucks – and designed against everyone else. No-one has time to catalogue the extent of Transport’s own guidance which this design does not follow, but the bus stops don’t meet the design guide, bike provision doesn’t meet the Cycleway Design Toolbox, and footpaths don’t meet the Walking Space Guide. To meet its own standard on distance between pedestrian crossings, Transport would have to build 16 more than it has proposed.
Like many of our members, I previously worked at Transport for NSW, and there are dozens of progressive, hard-working people there trying to improve things. Unfortunately, there is also a small cadre of men called David and Colin who prevent the first group from implementing Transport’s own policies, for reasons we cannot know.
At the Walkable NSW roundtable the Transport Minister, John Graham, expressed surprised that walking isn’t often included in what comes across his desk, and that we need to do more for people on foot. Minister, changing this project is the chance to do more.
If you’re a local concerned by Fifteenth Avenue, we encourage you to write to the local MP, and the Roads and Transport ministers. If you’re not a local, we encourage you to write to them anyway, because $1.4 billion of public money spent on a transit corridor with no transit really does affect us all.
The last words go to Transport for NSW. In their own Engagement Report, when locals asked for dedicated bus lanes immediately (one local quoted said “we are just living in a ditch with no public transport”) the response was:
“The current $1 billion funding is for the four-lane road upgrade and does not include dedicated bus lanes at this stage. However, we are planning to reserve space for future dedicated bus lanes where practical and will continue planning for the Liverpool to Airport transit corridor as funding becomes available.”
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