The newest Wildlife Park is likely to make leaving my Miller Street home via the Great Western Highway and Tablelands Rd t-junction even more nerve wracking than it is now.
Resident’s response to State Significant Development Scoping Report Blue Mountains Wildlife Park 10 Great Western Highway, Wentworth Falls NSW Submitted to the NSW Department of Planning on behalf of Aesthete No. 14 Pty Ltd.
20-1-2025
The developers are now wanting patrons to exit the proposed park by turning left (and thus west) up the hilly Great Western Highway in a direction away from Sydney.
This means that patrons, including bus and coach tours wanting to go to Sydney, will have to first turn left at the Tablelands Road t-junction. They would then have to use the bus turn-around facility there to come back out onto the highway at the t-junction.
The other option they have is to bypass the t-junction and continue further on west and then turn into Old Bathurst Road at the signalised intersection. But I’m betting that a lot of these drivers will attempt to make a u-turn at the first available left turn they encounter – and that’s the Tablelands Rd t-junction that me and my neighbours use.
Most locals will probably agree with me that it is often a gut-clenching moment attempting to turn right fr om Tableland Rd on to the highway towards Sydney. You have to stop at the t-junction, wait till there’s a break in the 80klm an hour-plus traffic coming up the hill to your right, then quickly scan to your left to make sure no-one’s approaching in the closest lane going east, and then move across to the slip lane in the middle of the highway.
But that’s where you know that it can all go wrong. The problem can be other cars approaching from the west and intending to use the slip lane to turn right into Tablelands Road against your own intended right turn. These drivers are supposed to have right of way over you, which local residents know very well and stay alert to. But visitors often either seem to forget it or they become distracted by the anxiety of the timing needed to reach the slip road and forget to scan to the left for turning cars.
I have often witnessed a car turning from the highway via the slip lane across to Tablelands Road suddenly find itself braking to avoid hitting a distracted driver trying to do the opposite manoeuvre. You can then have a situation where two cars have both come to a sudden halt facing each other across the highway as west bound traffic speeds towards both of them.
And any suggestion signalizing the Tablelands Road intersection to improve safety for park patrons is not going to be supported by Transport for NSW who have already rejected a previous proposal to put lights a littler further down at the site itself. The department said that installing traffic signals to control access to the site would disrupt efficient high speed traffic flow on the highway and increase risks to road user safety. So I ask why should users of this key linking highway be asked to take on increased safety risks so someone can run a resort catering to patrons who want to cavort with exotic creatures in the Blue Mountains?
I have no doubt that encouraging the future patrons of an approved Blue Mountains Wildlife Park to attempt turn-arounds at the Tablelands Rd t-junction intersection will only exacerbate the present stress and road safety risks.
Murray Matson, Spokesperson: Bodington Hill Wildlife Resort Action Group (BHWRAG)
