A calamitous day on the roads between Orange and Sydney earlier this week served as a reminder of why there was such disappointment at the deferral of an ambitious upgrade of the Great Western Highway.
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The truck and car crash near Mount Victoria that started Monday's problems could never have been foreseen, of course, and is the type of terrible accident that could happen on any highway anywhere.
Likewise, the roadworks on Bells Line that reduced that artery to one lane near Mount Tomah had been planned long before anyone knew that Great Western Highway traffic was suddenly going to be diverted that way.
The problem with both Bells Line and the Great Western Highway (from Katoomba to Lithgow, that is) is that neither has the ability to absorb any sudden, major problem.
Where the highways running north and south of Sydney have the lanes and capacity to keep the traffic, in some form, moving around a crash or an emergency of some sort, the frequently windy, frequently single lane Great Western Highway simply isn't up to it.
And yet it's the principal road between Sydney, all five million people of it, and a great swathe of the state.
Monday's problems, of course, wouldn't have been avoided had the previous NSW Government's highway upgrade program - which included the much-maligned planned tunnel under the Blue Mountains - been kept by the current NSW Government.
But we would have been a little further along the road to the highway being fully duplicated from Sydney to Lithgow. We would have had a timeline and a vague guide and a financial ambition, if nothing else.
And instead of that? Instead of that, we've got two roads over the Blue Mountains that simply aren't up to the job, with increasing loads of traffic on both, and a deferred plan to fix one of them.
We've got duplications underway at Medlow Bath and the Coxs River Road intersection, but that's where the story, at this stage, ends.
The people of our region need to be confident that they can cross the Blue Mountains when and if they choose - whether it's for something important like a medical appointment or something comparatively unimportant like a visit to family or friends.
They need to be confident that, having crossed the Blue Mountains, they'll be able to make their way back home again.
A closed highway is not good for anyone: not for drivers, not for the people who live in the villages along that highway and certainly not for the party that governs us.
