Close Calls On Our Hell Highway
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday August 3, 1995
IT'S A beautiful winter's day: sunny, dry and excellent driving conditions for trip number four hundred and something between Sydney and my home at Port Macquarie. Traffic is light now the school holidays are over.
Young couples in small hatchbacks head north for some warmth but caravans and semis make up most of the numbers.
North of Karuah, three drivers scramble to get past the car in front as an overtaking lane ends. The last bloke doesn't make it; finding himself in the opposing lane. This time he's lucky - it's clear.
Since 1985, 10,000 people haven't been so fortunate. Six hundred of these accident victims died.
To many Sydneysiders, it's the once-a-year escape route, to be endured with fellow refugees on the great crawl north for annual holidays. To locals like me, who live in the big resort towns and sleepy coastal villages in its path, it's the highway.
Arguably, the Pacific, which runs for 697 km from the northern bank of the Hunter River at Hexham to the Queensland border, no longer deserves highway status.
The recent release of the NRMA's seventh Route Performance Report on the Pacific paints a picture of a road that is, despite improvements to some sections, deteriorating as a major interstate link.
In 1992, the average age of the pavement on the Pacific Highway was 22 years. The design life was 20.
According to Andrew Macky, the NRMA's traffic engineering manager and an author of the report, "the money being spent on the Pacific now is hardly enough to keep it in reasonable condition, let alone improve it".
The cost of neglecting the Pacific has been the highest accident and fatality rate of any NSW highway. More than one-third of those crashes have been head-ons, or vehicle/object impacts, the two most serious crash types.
The Pacific is a road which punishes mistakes made by the thousands of ordinary and professional drivers who use it each day. Narrow, unsealed shoulders, a choppy surface, poor road alignment and camber, and lethal roadside hazards such as trees, embankments and bridge parapets are all there waiting to bite you if you get it wrong.
AN RTA stop/go man mucks it up at roadworks south of Buladelah. The Go (Slow) sign is out as a front-end loader lurches across the road.
On the Buladelah Bends through the hills north of town, a semi driver is taking the racing line. He regularly drifts a metre or so over the centre approaching and exiting corners. Luckily, he meets no-one coming the other way but the images remain indelible of the day one of his colleagues wasn't so fortunate. He failed to take a left-hander heading north, slid across the road and into the forest. He didn't hit anyone but even a semi can't break old growth trees. He was killed. His load of pipes lay scattered around the wreck. Today a pair of caravans is travelling together near Wootton. Typically, one has no wing mirrors, so the driver hasn't a clue about what's happening behind him.
I follow a local in an ancient Dodge flat-bed truck between Wootton and Coolongolook. Average speed about 45 km/h.
This stretch brings back memories, too.
A truck pulling a horse float overturned on a bend here. The humans survived but the sound of half a dozen badly injured horses, thrashing around, trapped and dying, is not one I wish to hear again.
South of Coolongolook, I spot the first police car for the day. Unusual. On an average trip I'll see three or four.
Approaching the village, a Falcon suddenly dives out from a line of oncoming traffic, which has been stuck behind a truck. The driver realises his mistake, but goes for it anyway. I slow, and he gets back to his side of the road with 20 metres to spare.
ON 64 per cent of the Pacific, according to the NRMA's report, overtaking is prohibited. It is single lane in each direction with only a white line separating you from the oncoming traffic.
Since 1990, the length of dual lane, divided carriageway on the Pacific has increased from 33 km to ... 64 km.
The safety benefits of dual lane, divided carriageway have been well established on NSW's other main interstate link, the Hume.
When the Campbelltown-Mittagong freeway was opened in the mid-1980s, crashes fell by 79 per cent. It was a similar story when the Berrima by-pass came into use; a 71 per cent reduction was achieved. The Pacific has about twice as many head-on and vehicle/object crashes as the Hume.
According to a leading North Coast orthopedic surgeon, the lack of action on improving the Pacific Highway is the result of general apathy about road trauma.
"The problem with the Pacific is that we didn't have a third bus crash, following the Grafton and Kempsey tragedies in 1989 when 55 people were killed," he says. "If a third crash had occurred, the Pacific Highway would have become a big issue in the 1990 Federal election, and something would have been done."
Tucked away, unobtrusively by the side of the road at Clybucca, north of Kempsey, is a memorial garden to the 35 people who died in Australia's worst road accident, in 1989. It was the second of two bus crashes. The first, at Cowper, further up the highway at Grafton, claimed 20 lives.
The Clybucca memorial is covered in flowers and photographs in plastic sleeves. Many show bright, happy, teenaged faces.
"The community seems quite prepared to accept two or three deaths at a time but it takes a major catastrophe for people to sit up and ask 'What's going on?'" says the local orthopedic surgeon.
"Typically, a serious crash on the Pacific will involve a couple of deaths and twice as many multiple injuries so bad that we can't treat them here."
The doctor predicts extra traffic generated by the Olympics will create huge problems for the hospitals along the Pacific Highway. "They will have great difficulty coping," he says.
THREE locals in Taree, desperate to cross the highway, each take a punt on beating the traffic streaming through town. They all make it. Two just.
Further north a dairy farmer is moving his herd across the highway on the river flats. We wait, musing that this is the main Sydney-Brisbane link his cows are ambling across. There are not many stretches of the Pacific which have been upgraded to dual-lane divided carriageway but those that are prove much safer.
Senior Sergeant Don Campbell is the traffic co-ordinator for the mid North Coast police district, which extends from just south of Buladelah to Halfway Creek, north of Coffs Harbour.
"On the once notorious Sapling Creek stretch of the highway between Kew and the Port Macquarie turnoff, we used to deal with numerous serious accidents - off-roads and head-ons mainly," says the sergeant. "Now, on the divided road section, we're not getting as many, and no head-ons. A divided road always cuts the road toll. But irrespective of the road, some drivers simply travel too fast for the conditions, especially in the wet."
At present, it takes about 9< hours to drive from Hexham to the Queensland border. If the Pacific was a dual-lane divided carriageway, it would take six hours. The financial benefits of such an improvement, both to the users of the highway and the economy as a whole, are obvious.
Improving the entire Pacific Highway to four-lane dual carriageway condition will, according to the NRMA, take more than 40 years if we keep working on it, and funding it, at the present rate. "If we set a target of 10 years," the NRMA's Mr Macky says, "we're looking at $400 million-$500 million per year. The State Government doesn't have that sort of money and the Pacific receives no direct Federal funding.
"The only way it's going to happen is if the Federal Government comes to the party like it did to the Hume. Or we look at the tollway option. A combination of publicly funded upgrades for some sections and tollways on others would take about 25 years."
Without big dollars from Canberra, the Pacific Highway will, it seems, continue to exist on a "user pays" basis.
With your money or your life.
PACIFIC FACTS
* Overtaking is prohibited on 64 per cent of the 697 km of roadway.
* The Pacific has claimed more lives every year since 1985 than any other NSW highway.
* Average speeds for the journey are typically no better than 70 km/h.
* Head-on crashes are disproportionately high on the Pacific, about one in 10 accidents.
* In 1993 there were 39 fatalities on the Pacific. For the first half of last year there were 24, the latest available figure from the RTA.
© 1995 Sydney Morning Herald
Share This