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Eastern Bypass
Eastern Bypass. Name for a road which was intended to continue Stirling Highway southwards from the Stirling Bridge. It was not built. See the debate about it in Fremantle, the newsletter of the Fremantle Society for June 1992; the article about it in the same journal in October 1996, pp. 3-4. See also chapter 12 of Ron & Dianne Davidson, Fighting for Fremantle: 113-114, as below:
page 113 ...
The Eastern Bypass debate also preoccupied the Fremantle Society at this time. This was part of a project to build a six-lane highway from Stirling Bridge to Mandurah, via Fremantle. The Fremantle section involved a new road from High Street to Roe Highway in Hamilton Hill, cutting through White Gum Valley and Beaconsfield. It had been part of the Metropolitan Region Scheme since 1973, with the City of Fremantle condemning it from the late 1970s as unacceptable socially, environmentally, and on planning grounds.
The Fremantle Society members were divided on this issue, with the committee finally resolving not to support deletion of the bypass, on the grounds that at some point it may become necessary. The general feeling on the committee was that it would be preferable if traffic could be improved using other measures like traffic calming and better public transport. In its newsletter in June 1992 both sides of the issue were argued by two passionate Society members, Heather Smedley and Curtin academic Bob Pokrant. Heather had been elected to the Fremantle City Council in 1991 campaigning largely against the bypass, while Bob had been actively lobbying to retain it as an option.
page 114
Jim McGinty had been a strong opponent of the bypass during his election campaign in May 1990, promising to ensure its deletion if elected ‘with a stroke of the ministerial pen.’189 The Fremantle and East Fremantle councils also maintained their opposition to the bypass, and in October 1992 the State Planning Commission deleted the planned extension at the request of the Minister for Planning, fulfilling McGinty’s promise. However, the bypass story was to be a long-running one: after the defeat of the Carmen Lawrence government in 1993 the bypass was reinstated by the incoming Liberal government, but was deleted again by the Labor government of Geoff Gallop, this time by an amendment to the Metropolitan Region Scheme. It remains a contentious issue, but its reinstatement seems unlikely given that much of the reserve land intended for the bypass has been sold.
References and Links
as above
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 7 June, 2020 and hosted at freotopia.org/streets/easternbypass.html (it was last updated on 18 November, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.