In addition to exposing road users (and construction workers and residents) to the multiple risks of boulder falls and landslide/s, the route the N.S.W. Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) is determined to use for the Bulahdelah section of the Pacific Highway Upgrade (Option E) would also have a hill.
That the speed limit for all traffic would lower from 110 km per hour to 100 km per hour at the hill's crest and that northbound laden trucks would be slowed by some 25 km per hour over a distance of 900 metres were recorded in the RTA document Bulahdelah Upgrading the Pacific Highway Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) as areas where the Option E route failed to meet upgrade objectives. However, although it was also recorded in the EIS that southbound laden trucks would be slowed by 20 km per hour over a distance of 1 (one) kilometre, this was not included as an upgrade objective failure.
The slowing of laden trucks would average out at around 22.5 km per hour over almost 2 kilometres. The Option E section of highway, albeit with sufficient width for later widening to six lanes, would initially have only two lanes on each side.
What a scenario: some 2 kilometres of trucks overtaking trucks, all traffic being slowed when this occurs and frustrated drivers galore - and all in a cutting beneath the nearly perpendicular, 40 metres tall cliffs of a 292 metres high mountain long known to be prone to rockfalls, boulder falls and landslides.
Although pre-construction work has commenced on this dangerous route, it is not too late for the safest route for road users - Option A, to the west of Bulahdelah - to be used. Already, massive sections of rock on the Alum Mountain's cliffs are being undermined by ongoing boulder falls which commenced at around the same time as did RTA blasting some ten kilometres south of Bulahdelah.
