I read with interest (and a distinct tinge of horror) Rose McKinley’s suggestion that the goat track between the two rural enclaves of St Helena and Hayters Hill be somehow sanctified, advertised and otherwise endorsed as a de facto Byron Bay bypass.
Having lived in and moved through this area since the 1970s and having had a variety of near misses on this road (the most lethal being a Queenslander with a 4 wheel drive, towing a10 metre powerboat on a trailer around a bend on my side of the road), I’m quite satisfied that the road should be closed to through traffic – not opened to more!
There is, of course, precedent for this – the residents of Possum Creek Road have survived (and thrived) for lengthy periods without through traffic after landslips rendered their lane unsafe for general use. If necessary, some form of ‘gated access’ could, I am sure, be arranged for the local landholders as, indeed, there is on the back road down to Seven Mile Beach.
The fundamental point that Rose misses is that the cost of establishing and maintaining such a local thoroughfare would be absolutely prohibitive (the ratepayers again) even assuming the residents of the area could tolerate the massive increase in traffic flow, noise, and fumes, to say nothing of the ever-present risk of head-on collisions with boy racers, amateur four-wheel drivers, campervans, van-packers, day trippers slavishly following GPS instructions, etc. .
So on engineering grounds, financial, environmental and social criteria – it gets the thumbs down.
Graham Mathews, Byron Bay
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