A new assessment of the Great Western Highway is in the works, but former deputy premier Paul Toole says the answer is already obvious.
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"We all know that a tunnel through the [Blue] Mountains is the only solution to making it safer for those people who travel to and from and through the Mountains," he says.
Transport for NSW says it is "working to develop a corridor plan for improving access and capacity along the Great Western Highway between Emu Plains and Bathurst" and the plan will consider "the future needs of both road and rail, local traffic, through traffic and freight".
"Previous assessments and studies, including an assessment of faster rail options and strategic work completed for the Great Western Highway upgrade between Katoomba and Lithgow, will be reviewed and assessed for their relevancy as possible inputs to the assessment," a spokesperson told ACM recently.
"Traffic volume data as well as data collected during recent traffic delays during peak holiday times at pinch points through the Blue Mountains will provide an important source of information to inform possible future options."
It comes after NSW and federal Labor's decisions to cancel or put on hold much of the previous NSW Coalition government's ambitious highway duplication plans from Lithgow to Katoomba and as new NSW Regional Transport Minister Jenny Aitchison says a better, more co-ordinated plan for the highway is needed.
Mr Toole was deputy premier as the NSW Coalition progressively unveiled its plans for the highway in recent years, including a central, though only partly funded tunnel from Little Hartley to Blackheath.
Asked about the plans for a new assessment of the Great Western Highway, Mr Toole said it sounded like a way of "kicking the project that is needed [for the Great Western Highway] down the road".
He said the duplication of a 2.4-kilometre section of the highway at Little Hartley was now a "road to nowhere" because Labor, federally and state, had withdrawn the funding for the upgrade to the highway on either side.
As well, "you've only got a small section of works occurring in and around Medlow Bath", he said.
"That entire 31-kilometre section of road [from outside Lithgow to Katoomba] was meant to be duplicated all the way through and they're short-changing the people of the Central West," he said.
Labor's say
NSW Regional Transport Minister Jenny Aitchison referred to "strategic corridor assessments" when she was in Bathurst in December 2023 to open the widened Great Western Highway from Kelso to Raglan.
She said the Albanese government wanted to do "strategic corridor assessments and they have highlighted this [the Great Western Highway] as one that needs to be done".
At a press conference recently at the Coxs River Road duplication site on the highway near Lithgow, meanwhile, Ms Aitchison mentioned the assessment again.
"We want to actually look at the whole network, have a look at the whole corridor, and do the enhancements," she told ABC Central West.
"Trying to bite off a project that's north of $11 billion [the NSW Coalition's only partly funded proposed tunnels], which only was coming out at Medlow Bath, it wasn't getting you right through the Blue Mountains, was something that, really, we just did not have the funding available for that.
"The Federal Government was not happy to put funds in, so that did create the situation where we had to put a pause.
"What we are doing now is doing that corridor assessment; getting the facts on the table of what is the best way to proceed."
