TRADERS at the busy Yarralumla shopping centre are protesting at the decision to close the Kent Street/Novar Street bridge over Adelaide Avenue for up to two months for the installation of traffic lights.
Yarralumla Resident Association (YRA) president Peter Pharaoh says there are about 9000 vehicle movements a day impacted by the decision to close the bridge.
The DRA quotes the contractor as saying they want to complete the “construction works in one main final burst rather than executing periodic weekend closures” that would have taken until May.
To date the project team has completed road widening and kerbs on the Adelaide Avenue off-ramp, laid hundreds of metres of conduit and cable for new streetlights and traffic lights, completed several utility relocations and adjustments and stormwater pit and pipe connections as well as poured the new concrete shared path along the bridge.
“We acknowledge these road closures will be inconvenient for residents, local businesses and the wider community, however we will be doing what we can to complete the works as quickly as possible and reopen the roads. We are working in a highly constrained location and closing these roads enables works to be completed more efficiently and safely for both the community and our project team,” says Emily Wadwell, of City Services.
She says the next stages of work include significant road pavement works at each of the three intersections. To complete these works as efficiently and safely as possible, significant road closures will be in place for about eight weeks from Saturday, January 14.
Road closures
- Kent Street/Novar Street (southbound direction): between Kintore Crescent and Macartney Crescent (including access to the Adelaide Avenue on-ramp from Novar Street).
- Kent Street/Novar Street (northbound direction): between Denison Street and Kintore Crescent.
- Denison Street (northbound direction): between Geils Court and Kent Street.
- Adelaide Avenue (southbound direction) exit ramp to Kent Street will be closed at Adelaide Avenue.
- Dudley Street (both directions): between Cotter Road and Novar Street / Kent Street.
- Access for pedestrians and cyclists across Kent Street bridge will be maintained at all times during the closures.
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![Teacher Vanessa Jones has been living in Higgins since 2001, and while she loves the area, she says she is “fed up” with the neglectful ACT government.
The Higgins shops have been completely abandoned, says Vanessa, preventing the opportunity for residents to have a community-centred space to socialise.
They only received bins nine months ago, she says, and requests for a water station and repairs to the bus station have gone unanswered.
“It’s very, very slow,” says Vanessa.
“I asked for the zebra crossing on Fullagar [Crescent] to be repainted, and we had to wait about six or nine months.
“That’s just such a long time… we pay a lot of rates.”
Vanessa says assistance from the government only seems to go to communities with time-rich and assertive communities, leaving places such as Higgins, where the majority of households have both adults working full-time and English may not be the first language of the family, at an automatic disadvantage.
“If you’ve got two people working, paying a mortgage, raising two or three kids, they don’t have the time,” says Vanessa.
Vanessa says the lack of attention quieter places such as Higgins is receiving is starting to look a lot like favouritism.
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