When a road around Orange was first planned it was called a city bypass and later became a ring road. Then it was named a distributor road, went briefly back to a bypass and now it’s the northern distributor.
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But because the council shot itself in the foot by rezoning land to the west that blocked the original planned route where there’s now dozens of houses in the Wentworth Estate, and selling land in the south that had been bought, that part of the bypass/ring road/distributor is now called a feeder road.
What the people in the Wentworth Estate calls it can’t be published here because they’re far from happy about cars and trucks tearing past their front windows in Ploughman’s Lane when it becomes a ‘feeder road’.
But there’s already some problems with the section of road adjacent to Wentworth Golf Club that has been rebuilt along with the railway crossing approaches.
Nothing has happened there since and there’s a chance the work might have to be done again.
And it looks as though the council is putting in more of those concrete traffic islands in Coronation Drive at the Ploughman’s Lane intersection.
There probably isn’t one of these new things in Orange that isn’t being regularly hit by cars, leaving black tyre marks.
More, how can the ‘feeder road’ section between Forbes Road and Cargo Road be widened without chopping down those poplar trees?
What will be done at the off-aligned Distributor Road/Forbes Road/Ploughman’s Lane intersection, presently the worst in Orange.
Another roundabout? Has the land needed in the south to get across from Forest Road to join up somewhere near the racecourse been locked in? Again.
So it’s fun times ahead for the new council to sort all this out.
Digging Down Deep to repair our roads
TALKING about roads, years ago sections of Kite Street, Woodward Street and Bathurst Road were real problems, so much so then city engineer Bill Holness almost tore his hair out trying to fix them.
Re-seals and patches continued to break up so the engineer dug down deeper than the Grand Canyon for the length of a full block to find a solid base in all three streets.
One of the deep dips was in Kite Street between Sampson and Clinton and along with Woodward Street in front of Elephant Park and Bathurst Road in front of Kinross, drivers at the time nicknamed them ‘Holness’ Holes’.
Woodward Street and Bathurst Road have held up but Kite Street hasn’t and the council has just had another go at reconstructing it although didn’t have to dig down towards China again to find a solid base like Bill Holness did.
But the next time you hit a rough patch on our streets you must remember Orange was initially known as Blackman’s Swamp.
Does that tell us anything?
Wrong Way puts law-abiding drivers under the pump
SOME of our aggressive Orange drivers are still taking short-cuts through petrol station driveways rather than waiting for lights to turn green.
They duck through the corner of the United driveway from Byng Street to Woodward Street when the lights are red and through the Shell station from Summer Street to Sale Street.
There’s usually enough traffic in the driveways as it is with cars going in all directions without some idiot tearing through there for a short-cut.
