THE Port Macquarie Chamber of Commerce has given a big thumbs-up to two multi-million-dollar development projects – but believes council needs to revisit the concept of link roads to cater for the traffic generated.
Commenting on plans unveiled last week for stage one of Charles Sturt University’s new campus and the opening of the Port Macquarie airport runway extension, president Hadyn Oriti said both were great news for Port Macquarie and the Hastings.
However, the major coastal link road, Lake Road, was already struggling to cope with existing traffic and the situation would become much worse when the new university campus opened in 2016 and airport visitation increased. New subdivisions, hospital expansions and new medical precinct were also generating increasing traffic.
“Ideally what Port Macquarie-Hastings Council needs to do first up is revisit the whole of the network strategy and see how all of these things are going to link up with the roads,” Mr Oriti said.
“Most of them seem to feed into cul-de-sacs and we are also ending up with a lot of traffic on Lake Road that doesn’t need to be there,” Mr Oriti said.
He said it might be time for council to revisit the idea of a link road to the south of Lake Road linking Ocean Drive through to John Oxley Drive or Oxley Highway.
He understood council had looked at such a link road in the mid-2000s but the project had been shelved because it involved crossing wetlands which were environmentally sensitive.
“It’s a shame they couldn’t do something then, so we may need to look at it again even if it is going to be difficult to do,” he said.
Mr Oriti said the chamber was engaged in ongoing discussions with council and measures to improve the flow of traffic would be high on the list of future topics.
In terms of the outlook for the Hastings as a whole, Mr Oriti said the new campus and airport upgrade were both obviously major pluses, but the future would have looked bright even without them.
“I think the future of Port Macquarie is assured, and I have been saying that for a long time,” he said. “We have some good things happening – the challenge is to make them happen as fast as we can.”
Mr Oriti, a solicitor, said he had also noticed business generally had picked up across the board for many local companies during the past few months, including the conveyancing turnover in his own company.
