Councillor Chris Harris

The prospect of twenty seven months of construction noise and dozens of trucks per day on your street would make the most stoic of residents unhappy.  And when your street is one of the quietest and most beautiful tree lined avenues in inner Sydney (pictured), unhappy doesn’t even begin to describe it.  Such was the mood of a group of Paddington residents, until an extraordinary meeting of City of Sydney Council’s traffic committee endorsed sweeping but sensible amendments to a controversial traffic management plan for the redevelopment of the College of Fine Arts (CoFA) site. 

The amendments restore the plan to a form that sees a general degree of acceptance from local residents who understandably want to minimise the impact that the construction will have on their neighbourhood.

When CoFA first proposed major redevelopment of its Paddington site the community were supportive but had concerns about the impact of construction on their quiet residential streets.  However the preparation of a traffic management plan, the approval of which rested with the City of Sydney, saw all construction traffic using the relatively major thoroughfare of Greens Road. This was a compromise most could agree on.

Unfortunately, in February this year CoFA submitted an amended plan that directed large numbers of trucks off Greens Rd. and onto the quiet residential streets of Albion Ave, Selwyn St, Josephson St. and Napier St. The community weren’t happy that the plan they’d negotiated in good faith had fallen by the wayside.

The new plan resulted in a long list of concerns from local residents including noise, loss of parking spaces, damage to streetscapes and the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. 

It was clear from the hundreds of emails that my Greens colleague Cr Irene Doutney and I received that the new plan wasn’t acceptable to the community.  So we called on Council to hold the extraordinary meeting of the traffic committee and have this new plan appropriately amended so that it reflected the spirit of the original negotiations.

During the meeting the passions of local residents were high but in the end CoFA representatives agreed to the amendments that will make the new plan similar to the original.

Under the amended plan trucks involved in the construction will enter & exit the site from Greens Rd via the Napier St. road closure. Trucks will only be able to use Selwyn and Josephson streets in a small number of predefined situations, with residents to be notified ahead of time when this is to occur.

The Greens have also requested that a member of council’s planning staff attend Construction Liaison Committee meetings which have been set up to resolve day to day issues that arise as the project progresses.

It is important that the City engages fully with the local community to protect the ambience & charm of some of inner Sydney’s most beautiful streets.  I think this is a case where this has successfully happened and it goes to show that, even in cases of major developments, positive outcomes can be achieved when parties get together and talk to each other.