Abandoned shopfronts, bleak car yards, crumbling concrete, raw sewage and a reliable stream of traffic and smashed bus mirrors.
It sounds more like a war-ravaged dystopia than a key artery through Australia’s largest city – but premiers and planners have vowed to turn it into the Champs-Élysées of Sydney.
So it was no surprise that at a summit this week, convened to pave a path forward to realise Parramatta Road’s long-promised potential, those gathered sought to convey its state of dereliction.
The New South Wales roads minister, John Graham, called it “the scar through the heart of Sydney” a descriptor that has become a favourite of state ministers tasked with revitalising it.
“Parramatta Road at the moment is dying, it’s on life support,” said Burwood mayor John Faker, whose council takes in part of its 23km length.
“It is so depressing,” remarked Sydney’s lord mayor, Clover Moore.
‘Boulevard of broken dreams’
It’s not just contemporary leaders who have lamented the state of what was Australia’s first intercity road, back before Parramatta became enveloped by Sydney.
In 1920, the then treasurer and later premier of NSW, Jack Lang, nicknamed the road Gallipoli, a reference to the trenches where the Anzacs had fought just a few years earlier.
The war references have endured, in part due to the tensions between state governments and the various local councils whose boundaries are pierced by the road. Without one primary stakeholder charged with its responsibility, the road struggled to keep up with a rapidly changing city.
Initially connecting horse, then tram traffic, between Sydney’s east and west, the arterial road became busier, catering to a growing population and sprawling city.
The tearing up of Sydney’s tram network in the middle of the 20th century and rise of the car commute led to near-constant congestion during peak times, deteriorating the quality of life for residents and pedestrians along the road. Ultimately that harmed the viability of local shops such as milk bars, which had become cornerstones of suburban life.
Today, with congestion, noise and tailpipe pollution more prominent than ever, it’s mostly car yards, speciality outlets such as bridal shops and a smattering of pubs and other services that remain on Parramatta Road – besides the For Lease signs.
Two-thirds of shops along the road were vacant even before the onset of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, a 2020 study estimated. The Inner West council mayor, Darcy Byrne, has claimed many older landowners are happy to keep their properties untenanted as they can use it as a tax write-off, and called for higher rates for empty shops to disincentivise the trend.
Even for a hilly city, the road is unpleasant for motorists to navigate, and difficult for larger vehicles. Buses are often too wide to pass each other on some of the narrower sections. Over the last six years, 495 bus mirrors were smashed on Parramatta Road.
For residents of Sydney’s inner west, it serves as an essential thoroughfare, but far from a destination in itself.
When Guardian Australia visited a section of Parramatta Road in Stanmore this week, raw sewage poured out from an empty shop front.
It’s all a far cry from the litany of grand plans for its future that have failed to materialise, which have seen it characterised as the “boulevard of broken dreams”.
The first major proposition to remove traffic from the road was put forward in 1951 by Joseph Cahill, who would become a premier and have another controversial road, the Cahill Expressway, named after him. His plan to build a western expressway to free up Parramatta Road never eventuated.
In 1968, the Sydney Region Outline plan included an idea for a freeway to fix Parramatta Road. While the Western Distributor and the M4 that were also part of the plan were built, the freeway was dropped.
Another plan in 1996, “Parramatta Road – Beyond 2000”, which included a taskforce that proposed more trees and bike paths to revitalise sections but without a solution to remove the traffic, did not materialise. In 2004, another plan was put forward, centred on new homes and jobs along the corridor.
Revitalising Parramatta Road was a key promise when the politically charged Westconnex motorway megaproject was announced in 2012. However, after more than $20bn spent on moving traffic to paid underground roads, the commitment to build dedicated public transport lanes and beautify the ground level has not transpired.
“It was very frustrating that the legal requirement for there to be dedicated public transport lanes on Parramatta Road was never carried out by the former government. I think it was pretty cynical that they realised that they didn’t have to carry out their own condition of consent because there was no one powerful enough to take them to court,” Byrne, a Labor-aligned mayor, said of the former Coalition government.
Major public transport injection
Entering the Committee for Sydney’s Parramatta Road summit on Wednesday felt a lot like yet another announcement of another grand plan.
Graham, the roads minister, was there, along with mayors and the press. Attenders were handed a brochure for a future light-rail line, with artistic renderings of trams running along various stretches of a tree-lined Parramatta Road, with trendy looking locals walking from modern cafes at the ground level of futuristic looking medium-rise developments.
Enthusiasm for the plan was high. The head of Altrac, which has built and operates Sydney’s other light-rail lines, spoke of how the transport project could breathe new life into Parramatta Road.
The only thing missing was the NSW government logo.
While councils and industry are onboard with the Parramatta light-rail plan, which was first floated in 2000 by Clover Moore, Graham said he won’t “rush into another vision … that doesn’t come to fruition”.
“I refuse to add to the tally of broken dreams,” he said.
Instead, the government wants to unite the various groups that agree on the problems with Parramatta Road, and is even open to the idea of creating a standalone agency to coordinate the various councils and leaders to transform the corridor.
Even with such an agency, consensus on a plan and funding source is far from clear.
While the City of Sydney wants the dedicated light-rail corridor from Burwood to Green Square, with room for limited car lane traffic in certain sections, Inner West council mayor Byrne is agnostic on the transport technology, and has raised the idea of cheaper “trackless trams” with dedicated lanes as achieving a similar outcome at a cost that would be easier to secure funding for.
Whether or not it includes light rail, Graham appears to agree with the mayors that Parramatta Road’s future should involve turning it from a “stroad” – a confused mix between road and street design for cars with big shop fronts, common in the US – to a tree-lined boulevard that supports the Sydney growth plan for medium rise housing centred around public transport stations.
For their part, urban planning experts at this week’s summit backed the potential of light rail to bring wholesale change to Parramatta Road, repeatedly pointing to George Street and how its new light-rail line has transformed it from a car-clogged street to a pedestrianised destination in its own right since.
While some critics claim light rail is too slow to be a serious mode of transport, supporters insist it shouldn’t be seen as a competitor to heavy rail or metro in achieving a comparable speed from each end of the line.
Rather, light rail should dictate a new speed for road users and provide an easy option to move shorter distances along it, in a future where Parramatta Road is the destination, not just an artery to escape it.
“We don’t need a grand new vision … the vision for this road has never died … we just need to find the right way to get there,” Graham said.
