Hold your nerve and spend big
THE problem with the Southern Outlet is not the need for an extra lane, it is the need to fix Macquarie and Davey streets. For the most part the Outlet flows smoothly unless there is a crash, but at the first set of lights it slows traffic from 80km/h to 50km/h. Add in traffic lights and congestion is chronic.
The need is to either spend money on a tunnel that will bypass Macquarie and Davey streets, or side roads like Molle, Barrack etc should be put either overhead or underground to allow flow of traffic down the main streets.
As for the Eastern Shore, bypass Midway Point entirely and possibly Sorell and have a double-lane highway all the way to Sorell at least.
Nothing will solve the problem of traffic without a large amount of money being spent and no government has had the nerve to borrow enough to fix it.
Public transport won’t work because people do not want to try to catch buses that are either early or don’t turn up at all.
Jan Smith Blackmans Bay
CAR PHONE DISTRACTION
I SAW an advertisement for a device to hold a mobile phone. This plastic contraption is designed to be placed in the cupholders in the central console. Pictured was a driver manually communicating on the phone. The message was, your phone is always at your fingertips.
We continue to be appalled by the death toll on our roads, yet here we are
retailing devices to further distract drivers from their responsibility of being in charge of a motor vehicle.
We already have radio, CD, Bluetooth, GPS and satnav screens to distract us. In all states of Australia it is illegal for a driver to be handling a mobile phone while in charge of a moving vehicle.
Some mainland states are now spending taxpayers’ money trying to employ more technology to detect the manual use of mobile phones while driving, in an attempt to stop carnage on our roads.
Steve Willett Spring Beach