IT was July 2015 and a milestone was being celebrated on the Great Western Highway.
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As the last witches' hats were removed at Bullaburra, west of Lawson in the Blue Mountains, it became official: the highway was now four lanes all the way from Penrith to Katoomba.
"Almost 200 years after the first road crossing opened across the Blue Mountains in 1815, the final section of the Great Western Highway upgrade has opened to traffic," then-NSW Parliamentary Secretary for Roads Andrew Gee said at the time.
The highway is "unrecognisable from Cox's original road of the 1800s, however, retains the spirit of the original pioneers and will continue to deliver significant benefits to NSW and local communities for many years to come", Mr Gee said.
Long story short
Great Western Highway upgrades
- 1960s: Springwood bypass.
- 1980s: Glenbrook, Blaxland, Valley Heights, Katoomba.
- 1990s: Lapstone Hill, Warrimoo, Linden Bends, Woodford Bends.
- 2000s: Faulconbridge, Linden, Wentworth Falls West, Leura.
- 2010: Lawson town centre.
The opening of the Bullaburra section was the culmination of a busy period for the highway.
It followed the widening of the 3.2 kilometres of highway from Woodford to Hazelbrook, which was completed in July 2014, and the widening of the highway through Lawson in 2010, which involved the demolition of the road-facing shops.
Fast-forward almost 10 years from that Bullaburra milestone, though, and progress has slowed considerably.
Having been started, paused and then restarted, a 1.2km duplication of the highway through Medlow Bath is back on track and is due to be finished next year, but a larger planned upgrade from Katoomba to Blackheath is officially on pause.
Mr Gee has moved into federal politics, moved on from the Nationals and has been a vocal critic of the new Labor state and federal governments' decision to pull funding from planned highway duplication works between Lithgow and Katoomba.
The road also remains troubled: historical data on Live Traffic shows there have been five incidents on the 11km stretch of the highway between Katoomba and Blackheath in less than three months, ranging from a truck breakdown to various vehicle crashes.
As the state and federal governments and oppositions continue to argue over which side of politics has the better, more genuine plan for a full duplication of the highway, a NSW Government advertisement from the Blue Mountains Gazette in July 2015 makes for interesting reading.
"Completion of the Great Western Highway upgrade," the advertisement said in large, bold type in an ad running across two pages.
Nine years later, some might argue that the job isn't actually done.
