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The traffic snarl extended to the Iron Cove Bridge and Drummoyne on Thursday morning.Credit:Kate Geraghty

The hour-long crawl along Victoria Road from Drummoyne to the Anzac Bridge during the morning peak makes the arterial route the worst affected by thespaghetti junction’s opening.

The NSW transport agency’s figures show a trip along the City West Link from Haberfield to Anzac Bridge averaged 29 minutes on Thursday morning,from 44 minutes a day earlier.

Sydney transport expert Mathew Hounsell said the congestion over the last four days demonstrated that the Rozelle interchange,which links to the Anzac Bridge,was “fundamentally a design flaw”.

“It is a forever problem because the system is funnelling too many people into a road that is too small. They assumed the Anzac Bridge could support more cars than was physically possible,” he said.

“Trying to shovel a motorway into the middle of a city was never going to work. The previous government and the roads department stuffed it up. They didn’t want to listen to anyone who would tell them it was not going to work.”

Hounsell,who has been critical of WestConnex,warned there were no easy solutions to fixing the congestion,although improving signage and instituting a toll-free period might help.

“They need to keep the buses running well otherwise people will start shifting to cars,which will make the problem worse,” he said.

Despite improvements on the City West Link,Transport for NSW co-ordinator general Howard Collins said motorists were still enduring up to an hour-long delay when travelling through Drummoyne,Balmain and Rozelle on Victoria Road from 8am to 9am.

While stressing that “no solution is off the table”,he warned that wideningmerge points by adding an extra lane where Victoria Road meets the Anzac Bridge or on the City West Link would push the bottleneck closer to the CBD.

“That will cause even greater challenges. What we have to be very careful[of is that] if we open up more lanes,the traffic jam will be at Anzac Bridge at the bottom or right in the city where we’ll be totally gridlocked,” he said.

Collins said the congestion “can’t be instantly fixed” and it was a balancing act for the agency between managing traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road because if “you benefit one,you hurt the other”.

Before the Rozelle interchange opened,seven lanes merged into four on the Anzac Bridge. Now,10 lanes are merged into four with the extra lanes from the spaghetti junction.

Motorists and buses crawl along Victoria Road in Balmain during the morning peak on Thursday.Credit:Kate Geraghty

Inner West Council’s Labor mayor Darcy Byrne said the traffic chaos caused by the interchange was precisely what the council had predicted would happen and needed to be resolved urgently.

“For more than a decade,council has warned that funnelling massively increased traffic flows to the Anzac Bridge would create a tunnel to a traffic jam,” he said.

Byrne said the former Coalition government stated repeatedly that traffic flows on Victoria Road would be reduced by 50 per cent when the interchange opened,a “claim that is laughable now”.

Coalition transport spokesperson Natalie Ward said the interchange’s opening was a mess because the Labor government had “blown it every step of the way”.

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