Residents of Dulwich Hill street say their lives have been upturned as thousands of cyclists, runners, walkers and tourists flock to new inner west trail.
On a sunny Saturday morning, halfway along Sydney’s newly opened GreenWay, a dozen frustrated residents gather with notebooks and pens. ‘I’m angry,’ one says. ‘I’m really angry.’
The group is holding a snap meeting with one of the local councillors to voice their concerns about the GreenWay, the pedestrian and cycling corridor that runs for 6km from Iron Cove to the Cooks River, almost entirely off-road.
It’s the ‘almost’ part that bothers the residents of Weston Street in Dulwich Hill. Their modest street with narrow footpaths forms a link between the northern and southern sections of the $57m trail where there is no straightforward option to take it off-road.
Since the GreenWay opened in mid-December, it has become a cycling, running and walking utopia, attracting thousands of visitors, especially at weekends. But as those visitors pass about 80 homes along Weston Street, the residents have become increasingly disturbed, to the point where some say they face a ‘Herculean tsunami of a community-wide mental health crisis’.
The broad consensus of the participants in the meeting is that, without urgent action, someone is going to get seriously injured or killed by a vehicle. Secondary to that is the noise disruption and impact of a sudden swarm of people on their once-quiet residential street.
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