Sydney Bypass

Sydney Bypass refers to a number of roads, existing and proposed, that motorists can use to avoid the congested approaches to the city's central business district (CBD). The main bypasses are:

Some disjointed sections of such planned roads were built but during the 1970s, the focus changed and many sections of these proposed roads were never built. Such disjointed segments of freeway can be seen in such places as Hunters Hill near Gladesville Bridge, where segments of the North West Freeway were constructed.

Around this time, freeway planning shifted to building freeways as bypasses.

For decades, it has been desired to construct a Freeway standard bypass of Sydney as part of the National Highway, connecting the Pacific Motorway to the Hume Motorway to allow through traffic to be separated from local traffic.

The North West Freeway was originally intended to fork in the Lane Cove Valley, with one fork following what is now the M2 corridor and the other following what is now the Pacific Motorway. If these had been built, traffic would have looped at that fork in much the same way as traffic from Burns Bay Road loops around the approach to Gladesville Bridge to turn west on Victoria Road. The Lane Cove section was abandoned for environmental reasons, leaving the then Sydney-Newcastle Freeway (now Pacific Motorway) to terminate at Pennant Hills Road.

In the 1960s, the DMR signposted a number of ring roads via existing surface streets. Of these, only the A3 ring-road remains today.

In 2001, at the same time as announcing commencement of the M7, the Federal Government proposed that the M7 would form part of a bypass route, with a new road branching off the M1 near Mount White and crossing the Hawkesbury River with a new high-level bridge to join the M7 at its distinct northwestern corner. Hence, the road would avoid the steep grades of the Mount White section of the Pacific Motorway immediately north of the existing low-level bridges across the Hawkesbury River and would be a quite direct bypass of Sydney that would be separated from much of Sydney's Commuter traffic.

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Wikipedia