One of Sydney’s busiest bus lanes will open to general traffic to make way for NorthConnex
Bus customers will experience delays in the afternoon peak, as one of Sydney’s busiest bus lanes is opened up to general traffic during NorthConnex construction, the New South Wales (NSW) government announced this week.
Work will start to build an extra lane of traffic on the Hills M2 between Pennant Hills Road and Windsor Road on February 6.
NorthConnex will provide a new link for motorists travelling between western Sydney and the NSW central coast, carrying more than 100,000 vehicles each day and will remove around 5000 trucks from the congested Pennant Hills Road corridor.
“We’ll see major travel time improvements and thousands of trucks off Pennant Hills Road,” NSW minister for roads Duncan Gay says of the project.
“While work is carried out on the Hills M2 over the next two years, road users travelling westbound will need to reduce their speed for a few kilometres of the motorway.”
Motorists and bus passengers will have to be patient and factor in the additional travel times.
“NorthConnex will be great for tradespeople and motorists travelling between western Sydney and the central coast and Hunter region – it will effectively be a bypass of Sydney’s busy CBD,” Transurban Group general manager NSW Andrew Head says
“These are important works to enable the construction of NorthConnex, which completes a missing link in Sydney’s motorway network, but we will work hard to minimise disruption to all road users.”
Additional travel time has already been built into timetables for Hillsbus M2 services in October last year in preparation for major work in the CBD and NorthConnex.
The $3 billion NorthConnex project jointly funded by the Federal and NSW governments and Transurban, will include twin nine kilometre tunnels under Pennant Hills Road that will bypass 21 traffic lights, saving motorists 15 minutes of travel time and help ease traffic on side streets when it opens in 2019.
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