Flying cars before the Barton Highway duplication?

OPINION: It seems incredible that the current phase of the duplication of the Barton Highway started way back in October 2001 when the decision was finally made to adopt the outer Eastern route for Murrumbateman.

If you were driving on the Barton in those days, you were driving a VX Commodore, and getting a fuel economy of about 11litres/100km.

Pru Goward had started a stint as Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, and Angus Taylor had just finished a few years work as a partner with McKinsey and Co.

We were all talking about the Children Overboard affair and just getting over the shock of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Remember those days? They were fourteen years ago. Since then, the duplication of the Barton Highway has gone exactly nowhere.

The years since have been characterised by a patchwork of local improvements that have not succeeded in actually improving that 41Km goat track that joins Southern Australia to the national capital, but just to make it a little bit less deadly.

Yes, improvement works have taken place, but they have not changed the characteristics of the road. It is still a winding two-lane blacktop with narrow shoulders, poor visibility and too infrequent overtaking lanes.

It is now 2015, and you are likely to be driving something like a Mazda 3 with a fuel economy of 5.7 litres/100km (or a SUV that takes half your wage to keep in fuel).

Now Ms Goward and Mr Taylor are our political representatives and we’ll soon have a ‘Barton Highway Improvement Strategy’.

FILE PHOTO: Goulburn MP Pru Goward and Hume MP Angus Taylor discussing the Barton Highway with lobbyists earlier this year.

Alas, as the NSW Government website notes, “current funding for the Barton Highway is for duplication planning and safety works only. The timing for commencement of duplication works has not yet been decided.”

So, in almost fifteen years we have moved from a decision on what side of Murrumbateman some future bypass should go to… developing an improvement strategy that has neither funds nor timeline for the actual duplication of the road.

So, what (if anything) can we expect in another fifteen years?

Let’s imagine the world of 2030.  Yass now has some 10,000 inhabitants and is a dormitory suburb of Canberra.

Subdivisions line the Barton almost all the way from Hamilton Rise to Parkwood West.

Traffic density has grown apace so the morning commute is now an even more painful crawl. Thankfully it is a much quieter crawl due the prevalence of electric cars and self-drive systems.

The local electorates are still safe Coalition seats, so nothing much has happened to the funding for the Barton, except for a few million here and there at election times to keep the locals from getting restive.

What about in yet another fifteen years?

The Yass of 2045 is much more crowded, warmer and drier than we know today.

Tensions focus on the cost of access to water, the inability of the council to get its infrastructure planning quite right and on the constant influx of refugees from the Pacific Islands that have become uninhabitable due to sea level rises.

Not a very nice picture overall, except for one bright element.  The flying car is finally here!

Yes, Tesla and Moller finally perfected their joint project to create an affordable flying electric car some years back and the people of the Yass Valley are enthusiastic proponents!

And it is in October 2045, when the Liberal MP for the electorate of Hume finally announces that funding has been approved for the duplication of the Barton Highway… just in time for the road itself to become obsolete.  Bloody typical!

* Views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily representative of Scoop Yass Valley.