Bathurst Regional Council set to consider southern ring road to help ease traffic congestion

Well, in the next decade, there may well be.

Councillor Warren Aubin said Bathurst Regional Council was considering building a bypass around the city as part of its future infrastructure planning, ensuring motorists could completely bypass the busiest parts of Bathurst as they make their way east or west.

"In the plans that the consultants did for the RMS (Roads and Maritime Services) and council about our roads in the district, the southern bypass road was brought up and drawn on the plans," Cr Aubin said.

The bypass would be from Littlebourne Street in Kelso and go around the city, eventually bringing traffic out somewhere near Lloyds Road.

The idea of a bypass around Bathurst is not new.

It was mentioned around six years ago, but it didn't progress far. Council also commissioned a Bathurst Southern Ring Road Study as far back as 2008.

Cr Aubin said the road would benefit heavy vehicles, but wouldn't necessarily prevent tourists from stopping in Bathurst, likening it to the Northern Distributor Road in Orange.

"It never got taken off the cards, but it sort of got put on the backburner," he said.

"Bathurst has grown exponentially in the last six to seven years, more than we thought; it has become something that needs to happen.

"It needs to be something that we are looking at quite seriously on the books - and it is going to be expensive."

Councillors have commented on several occasions that the roads infrastructure in Bathurst had fallen behind the city's growth.

"It's always been the case that developers buy land or council buys land for housing and our growth outruns our infrastructure. That has been a lifelong problem," Cr Aubin said.

"Our road network has never really been up to scratch with our growth and that needs to change."

Cr Aubin said a bypass was one of two roads that had to be considered and made a priority of council into the future to address the issue.

"The two major roads I think we have to get done is the third crossing over the river to Kelso - which would need to be done basically now - and the other is the ring road," he said.

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The challenge, he said, was that both of these projects would require council to find money for studies and land acquisition.

Council recently voted to adopt the Laffing Waters Master Plan that has been in development. As part of those discussion, councillors flagged the issue of how additional traffic movements would be accommodated.

Those discussions sparked new calls for an additional river crossing, with Cr Aubin suggesting that Laffing Waters Lane be continued until it linked with the lower end of Rankin Street.