Hills Motorway

Hills Motorway
Basic data
Operator:	Roads and Maritime Services
Start of the street:	Lane Cove Tunnel North Ryde ( NSW ) ( 33 ° 48 ′  S , 151 ° 8 ′  E )
End of street:	M7 WestLink Old Windsor Road Baulkham Hills ( NSW ) ( 33 ° 45 ′  S , 150 ° 57 ′  E )
Overall length:	21 km
States :	New South Wales

 Map with all coordinates: OSM | WikiMap

The Hills Motorway is an urban freeway in the northern suburbs of Sydney in the east of the Australian state of New South Wales . The toll road connects the Lane Cove Tunnel in North Ryde with Old Windsor Road and the WestLink in Baulkham Hills .

history

Before this road was built, Sydney's western suburbs were poorly connected to the city center. Traffic ran through Parramatta and via Victoria Road and the Western Motorway into central Sydney. Although Parramatta was given a complete bypass in 1986, traffic at peak times regularly jammed in Victoria Road and all other western feeders to the city center.

The Hills Motorway was supposed to connect Old Windsor Road at Baulkham Hills with Epping Road in North Ryde, avoiding the city's busy western suburbs. Epping Road in turn connects to the Gore Hill Freeway in Artarmon , which then crosses the Sydney Harbor Bridge into Sydney city center.

In the planning phase, today's Hills Motorway was run as Freeway Corridor F2 (also North West Freeway ). As part of the integrated highway planning for Sydney of 1942, the F2 was to lead to the Gladesville Bridge and then on over high-altitude lanes through Drummoyne to the ANZAC Bridge . The properties already reserved for this purpose were only sold by the government of New South Wales in 1988. This is the reason for the freeway-like road from Gladesville Bridge to Hunters Hill and the grass strip north to the east end of the Hills Motorway. Evidence of the old route of the F2 can be found in old city maps, according to the Western distributor , which connects the ANZAC Bridge to the city center, is called the North West Freeway .

The junction of Epping Road with Pittwater Road was once supposed to be an important junction of "Sydney's Missing Roads" (German: connecting roads for Sydney to be built) until 1977 when the plans for a North Western Expressway and a Lane Cove Valley Expressway were abandoned .

An investigation and planning committee chaired by John Woodward demanded in July 1990 that the proposed motorway (F2, construction section 1) between Pennant Hills Road in Beecroft and Epping Road in Ryde should not be built. As a result, the government of New South Wales conducted an investigation into the impact of the expressway on the environment and in May 1993 announced an operator model for this road. The M2 Hills Motorway is privately funded. The government of New South Wales signed a contract with Hills Motorway Ltd. about the construction, operation and finally handing over of the road to the government in 45 years.

When it opened on May 26, 1997, the Hills Motorway was the first electronic toll road in Australia. In April 2007, Transurban announced that the Hills Motorway would be made toll-free from December 1, 2007. The toll exemption actually only took place on January 30, 2012.

In April 2007, a third lane towards the west on the previous bicycle and emergency lane was released between the Lane Cove Tunnel and the Beecroft Road intersection. There were objections to this from cyclists who now have to use a different route and from motorists who said the additional lane would only attract more traffic and move the bottleneck further west. A surveillance camera for the speed limit of 70 km / h was also installed in front of the tunnel on Epping Road / Norfolk Road.

The Lane Cove Tunnel was opened on March 25, 2007 and connects the Hills Motorway at Lane Cove to the Gore Hill Freeway. The WestLink opened on December 16, 2005 and connects the Hills Motorway at Casula to the South Western Motorway .

course

The Hills Motorway connects in North Ryde, on the Lane Cove River , directly to the Lane Cove Tunnel (Met-2) and leads first to the northwest through Macquarie Park and Epping . It then pivots west through Beecroft, Carlingford and Baulkham Hills for connection to WestLink (M7) and Old Windsor Road (Met-2).

Crossings and junctions

Hills Motorway
Connections to the west	Distance to Windsor (km)	Distance to Sydney (km)	Connections to the east
At the end of Hills Motorway, continue as WestLink to Lithgow / Canberra	24	32	Start of Hills Motorway from WestLink
Rouse Hill, Windsor Old Windsor Road
Parramatta , Baulkham Hills Windsor Road	27	29	Exit under construction
Start together with	32	24	Hornsby , to via Newcastle , Brisbane ; Parramatta , Liverpool, Carlingford, Epping , Castle Hill Pennant Hills Road ( Cumberland Highway )
Castle Hill, Hornsby Pennant Hills Road ( Cumberland Highway )			further than
Epping , Beecroft Beecroft Road	34	22nd	no exit
TUNNEL	35	21st	TUNNEL
TOLL BOARD	38	18th	TOLL BOARD
Exit under construction	39	17th	Macquarie Park Christie Road
no exit	40	16	Pymble, Ryde Lane Cove Road
no exit	41	15th	Chatswood, Ryde Delhi Road
Ryde , Epping Epping Road	42	14th	no exit
Start of Hills Motorway further from Lane Cove Tunnel			End of Hills Motorway and continue as Lane Cove Tunnel to Sydney

future

A highway standard bypass from Sydney has been on the national highway map for decades. There are now plans to build a new underground road from the Hills Motorway near the junction with Pennant Hills Road to the Sydney-Newcastle Freeway north of Pearce's Corner in Wahroonga .

A Ryde City Council report criticized the lack of direct connections to the Hills Motorway in Macquarie Park . In addition, additional entrances and exits at various points should improve access and avoid traffic jams. In particular, the report proposes negotiations between Transurban and the Road Administration to build the eastern driveways on Lane Cove Road . The proposed eastbound driveway on Lane Cove Road would help avoid traffic jams from Pymble to the city center and simplify the difficult four-lane walk across Epping Road to the Lane Cove Tunnel. The need for this measure was already mentioned in the 2002 report to the Director General on the Lane Cove tunnel planned at the time. The road traffic authority did not respond to the Ryde City Council's requests for additional driveways in connection with the tunnel project.

The Hills Motorway is currently being expanded since January 2011. The measures should be finished by the beginning of 2013 and include additional driveways, e.g. B. East on Windsor Road .

literature

• Steve Parish: Australian Touring Atlas . Steve Parish Publishing, Archerfield QLD 2007, ISBN 978-1-74193-232-4 , p. 22.

Web links

• The Hills Motorway website (English)
• Webcam (M2-Ryde)
• F3 to Sydney Orbital Link Study. Sinclair Knight Merz
• Hills M2 Motorway . RTA

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The Gore Hill Freeway and the Lane Cove Tunnel were not part of the originally planned route of the F2 and the freeway corridor F1 ( Warrignah Freeway ) should connect via the Roseville Bridge and not through the Hills District to the beaches in the north of the city.
2. ↑ North Western and Lane Cove Expressways !! . Ozroads
3. ↑ Hills M2 and Eastern Distributor now cashless. Hills M2
4. ^ M2 Hills Motorway . Ozroads. Retrieved August 30, 2011.
5. ↑ Integrating Transport with Land Use in the City of Ryde: Draft Center Report for Macquarie Park . PBAI Australia. March 2007 ( Memento of the original from September 4, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ^ Proposed Lane Cove Tunnel and Associated Road Improvements, Volume 1 . NSW Department of Planning. November 2002. ISBN 0-7347-0393-7 ( Online ( Memento of the original from September 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove it Note. , PDF)