After almost a year’s warning, commuters in Perth’s south were bracing themselves for carmageddon when the number of river crossings near the port city was reduced to just one.
More trains and buses were scheduled and a free-travel zone was declared in Fremantle in a bid to push people onto public transport, while signs warning of the imminent shutdown were displayed to drivers for weeks along major roads.
But a muted start to the shutdown this week has drivers – and the government – breathing a sigh of relief.
When WAtoday took a meandering route into the office via the Stirling Highway Bridge on Thursday morning, it was relatively quick to get through the congestion pinch-point.
The commute home in the afternoon is when the intersection really feels the strain; a sign on Stirling Highway just before the Dingo Flour mill warned of a 13-minute trip to Canning Highway, just down the road – and that seemed optimistic.
But was the smooth start to the 12-month shutdown a fluke? And how will it last?
“The chose the perfect day for a start,” says Cam Dumesny, chief executive of the Western Roads Federation.
“I don’t think there was any container ships in on the weekend.
“This weekend, I think there’s five or six container ships due in, so there’ll be a lot of truck volume, then onto early next week.
“So we’ll start to see the bridge tested in different circumstances. You can have good days and bad days, it’s the nature of the beast.”
Add in heavy equipment and trucks with wide loads, and traffic impacts are inevitable.
“At the end of the day, it’s an active working port,” Dumesny said.
“And we’ve got to keep it efficient.”
While the messaging to commuters began almost a year ago, Dumesny said consultation with the trucking industry was lacking.
He said efficiencies around the number of large, 40-foot containers that could be transported by one truck, as well as the process of getting containers out of the port via rail were all avenues that could have been explored.
Another contributor to the early success of the closure could lie in changing workplace habits.
Professor Julia Richardson, from Curtin University’s School of Management and Marketing, said the bridge’s closure on Sunday could have played into a documented trend of people choosing to work from home on Mondays or Fridays.
“And to be fair, we did get a lot of advance warning of this,” Richardson said.
“There were posters up everywhere, it was on the news regularly, so people could certainly plan for it.”
Richardson said the impact of employment trends on the commute went beyond just working from home.
“We know also that there’s an increasing number of people who are starting an hour later or starting two hours later and working later into the evening,” she said.
“So it’s not just are they or are they not working from home, it’s that whole flexible work issue that you know, start and finish, times are changing as well.”
Richardson said a “wise government” would have a sense of workplace trends to give confidence a commuter network could survive a shutdown or major infrastructure upgrade.
However, easy transport routes to work remained important – and a shutdown couldn’t last too long.
“We’ve got a paradoxical situation of, we can’t close it down forever, because ultimately, we want to make it as easy as possible for the commuter,” Richardson said.
“Because we know absolutely from research that the more problematic and the longer the commute is, the much more likely that’s going to impact on employment decisions; where people will choose to work, whether or not they’ll want to be able to work from home.”
Transport Minister Rita Saffioti on Tuesday noted feedback had been that traffic was heavier.
“We again apologise for that, but we’ll continue to work with the community to try and limit the impact,” she said.
“I got some feedback from a Fremantle resident saying that his experience was very, very good in relation to yesterday morning, but that was the first day.
“What we always know is sometimes, as people experience a really good outcome, they go back to try and use that area.”
Saffioti said train boardings were up 35 per cent at Fremantle station on Monday.
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