The Right Turn I Refused To Make
Published
The first time I came to the end of Evans Road in Carlingford, my navigation told me to turn right onto Pennant Hills Road.
I looked right.
I looked left.
Then I looked at the intersection again, because I thought perhaps I had misunderstood what was being asked of me.
Pennant Hills Road is not a quiet suburban street. At this intersection it carries about 30,000 vehicles a day. There are five traffic lanes to contend with across the intersection: three eastbound, including a turning lane, and two westbound. On the opposite side is Lloyds Avenue. There are no traffic lights.
And somehow I was expected to turn right across it.
No.
I turned left.
This was less convenient. I had to work my way around and approach Pennant Hills Road again from a direction where I could make a simple left turn. It cost me a little time.
I considered this a very favourable exchange for not being hit by a car.
I assumed I had discovered one of those peculiar little defects of an old city: an intersection designed for another age, when there were fewer cars and everyone had simply learned to live with it.
Then I looked it up.
That is when the intersection stopped being merely frightening and became infuriating.
The authorities already know.
They have known for years.
The paperwork knows it is dangerous
There is something almost reassuring about reading a traffic engineer describe an intersection you have just refused to use.
It means you weren't imagining it.
Traffic assessments of the Evans Road intersection have described motorists struggling to find sufficiently large gaps in Pennant Hills Road traffic. They have documented unsafe behaviour that follows from this: drivers accepting inadequate gaps, vehicles becoming exposed within the intersection, and aggressive lane-changing as motorists try to complete their manoeuvres.
This is important.
It is tempting to describe a bad intersection as a problem of bad drivers. Someone gets impatient. Someone takes a chance. Someone misjudges the speed of an approaching car.
But good road design anticipates human beings.
If an intersection repeatedly places ordinary motorists in a situation where impatience is rewarded and caution produces long delays, the problem is not adequately explained by saying people should be more careful.
A road should not operate as a recurring test of courage.
The official crash record makes this less theoretical.
A City of Parramatta traffic report says there were 12 recorded crashes at the Pennant Hills Road, Evans Road and Lloyds Avenue intersection during the five years from July 2018 to June 2023.
The same report was produced because of another extraordinary feature of the intersection. Until changes were proposed in 2024, a motorist exiting Lloyds Avenue could legally drive straight across Pennant Hills Road into Evans Road — crossing five lanes of traffic.
Council wanted that stopped after a serious-injury crash involving precisely that movement.
There is a peculiar bureaucratic quality to an intersection at which one unsafe movement has to be prohibited while the larger problem remains sitting there.
They knew in 2018
Here is the part I find difficult to accept.
According to a 2025 City of Parramatta assessment report, Transport for NSW had committed in writing in 2018 to deliver upgrades at this intersection as part of the State-led Stage 1 rezoning of the Telopea Precinct.
The report says the upgrade was recognised as critical to managing the traffic associated with the population growth planned for Telopea.
That is not a typo.
By May 2020, Parramatta Council was calling for short-term safety improvements at Evans Road and Pennant Hills Road and explicitly advocating that traffic lights be prioritised.
In February 2021, Council raised the matter again.
The language is wonderfully restrained. Council staff said they understood the works would be delivered by Transport for NSW, but that Council had received no recent update on the timeframe.
Government has developed an impressive vocabulary for describing the passage of time without anything happening.
The years continued.
In 2023, a Parramatta traffic-project list contained the intersection again:
Pennant Hills Road at Evans Road, Carlingford — Install traffic signals.
Still no lights.
Then a developer entered the story
Across Pennant Hills Road sits one of Carlingford's major redevelopment sites, 263–281 Pennant Hills Road.
As plans for hundreds of additional apartments progressed, the intersection naturally returned to the paperwork.
In 2024, Transport for NSW advised that the development necessitated signalisation of the Pennant Hills Road/Evans Road/Lloyds Avenue intersection, including to provide safe pedestrian access across Pennant Hills Road.
For a moment, the solution seemed to have found a vehicle.
The signals might be delivered as "works in kind", connected to infrastructure contributions generated by development.
This is where the story becomes almost comic, if road safety were a funny subject.
In November 2024, TfNSW recommended a condition requiring the signals and associated civil works to be fully completed before an Occupation Certificate was issued for part of the development.
That sounds fairly definitive.
Then, in December, TfNSW reconsidered.
It concluded that the signals were a broader precinct requirement rather than something sufficiently connected to that particular development. The developer therefore would not be required to deliver them under that condition. Instead, the government would explore delivery through the Housing and Productivity Contribution framework.
The traffic lights moved once again from something that had to be built to something that had to be discussed, coordinated and funded.
Council wrote to TfNSW and the Department of Planning in March 2025.
Its argument was not subtle.
Council said TfNSW had long recognised the need for the signals. It reminded the agencies of the 2018 written commitment. It described the intersection as presenting a pedestrian safety risk and causing significant delays.
Council asked for written assurance that the signals would actually be delivered in conjunction with the development.
According to the June 2025 assessment report:
"No confirmation of this has been received from TfNSW."
And now we arrive in 2026
Perhaps eight years is enough time for an intersection to make its way through government.
Apparently not.
In August 2025, the Roads Minister was asked in Parliament whether there were plans to install the lights.
The answer said the intersection had undergone a high-level investigation and rapid appraisal and had been recommended for "further development and investigation."
Progress was subject to a business case and statewide funding prioritisation.
Transport for NSW would continue to monitor traffic conditions.
There is a certain poetry to this.
An intersection identified for improvement years earlier, with traffic signals repeatedly proposed, was now being monitored to determine whether the thing everybody had been talking about improving should progress toward further investigation.
By 2026 the project had migrated again, this time into the Greater Sydney Infrastructure Opportunities Plan and the Housing and Productivity Contribution system.
Local MP Monica Tudehope continued asking questions in Parliament.
On 4 June 2026 she asked a very simple one:
What is the timeline for funding the traffic lights?
The Government replied on 9 July.
It explained the infrastructure contribution framework. It explained which department administers it. It explained that the intersection is listed as infrastructure eligible for delivery under the scheme.
It did not provide a date.
The same parliamentary answer contained another number.
Transport for NSW reported six crashes at the intersection during 2024 and 2025.
Six crashes.
Two years.
The Government cautions that some recent non-fatal crash data remains incomplete because crash coding lags by several months.
So even that number may not yet tell the whole story.
What exactly are we waiting for?
I understand that traffic lights are not installed by a man arriving on Tuesday morning with a ladder.
Pennant Hills Road is a state road. Signals have to integrate with a major traffic corridor. There are engineering designs, pedestrian requirements, utilities, traffic modelling, construction planning, budgets and competing infrastructure projects.
Government has to do these things properly.
But there must be a point at which "proper process" becomes indistinguishable from institutional paralysis.
This intersection has crossed that point.
The history matters because each individual document sounds reasonable when read by itself.
Of course TfNSW needs to investigate.
Of course Council needs approval.
Of course funding needs to be identified.
Of course a development contribution must have the appropriate nexus.
Of course infrastructure projects must be prioritised.
Of course another assessment is required.
Each sentence is defensible.
Put the sentences together across eight years and they become absurd.
That is how bureaucracy can fail without anybody necessarily making one spectacularly bad decision. Every person handles the paper in front of them correctly. The paper moves to another desk. The intersection remains exactly where it was.
And motorists continue arriving at Evans Road.
I needed ten seconds
This is what stays with me.
I knew none of this when I first arrived there.
I had not read the traffic studies. I did not know about the 2018 commitment. I had not read Parramatta Council minutes from 2020 and 2021. I knew nothing about planning agreements, Housing and Productivity Contributions, works-in-kind arrangements or parliamentary questions.
I was simply sitting in a car.
I looked at the road.
And in perhaps ten seconds I decided:
I'm not turning right here.
I turned left and went the long way around.
Years of reports, correspondence, planning assessments, council motions and parliamentary questions have since confirmed that my instinct was not unreasonable.
There is a lesson in that, although not a comforting one.
Sometimes a problem is difficult because nobody knows the answer.
This isn't one of those problems.
We know what the problem is.
We know where it is.
We know the intersection carries heavy traffic.
We know crashes occur there.
We know Council wants traffic signals.
We know Transport for NSW has investigated traffic signals.
We know the State Government committed to an upgrade years ago.
We even know what the solution is supposed to look like.
The only mystery remaining is why, after all these years, motorists are still being asked to make that right turn.
Traffic lights are not an ambitious piece of twenty-first-century infrastructure.
Put them in.