The release last week of the Auditor-General’s performance report into peak hour travel on Sydney’s major roads revealed that traffic is getting slower in the afternoon. However, the report says that there has been a minor improvement in travel times in the city’s morning peak hour.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the average afternoon speed on seven major roads dropped from 43km/h to 40km/h over the past five years. The average morning speed increased from 29km/h to 30km/h in the past year, but has remained around that mark for the past five years.
Victoria Road, in the inner west, is Sydney’s slowest major corridor, where motorists crawl along at about 23km/h in the morning peak. The other roads measured are: the F3, the M2, the M4, the M5, Pittwater and Military Roads and the Princes Highway.
CityRail continues to struggle to meet punctuality benchmarks, achieving a 93.4 per cent peak hour on-time running in the 2011-12 year. This is its worst result for five years; there were more than 40 occasions last year when fewer than 80 per cent of peak-hour trains ran on time.
The report also looks transport infrastructure and touches on the Opal card project including how much this has cost taxpayers.