so far… not too sure

Yay! Peninsula link opened this morning. Which way should I go? Our house is more or less an equal distance from Penlink and the old Frankston Fwy. Turning left is easier, so I turned left and headed along the Cranbourne-Frankston road to take the Frankston Fwy.

Surely Penlink would be crowded with drivers keen to lose their Penlink virginity?

At 6.15 am the corner of C-F Road and McMahons road [Moorooduc Hwy] was so deserted it was weird. No queuing required to turn on to the FKN Fwy. No right lane hogging required on the Fwy, as hardly any traffic was coming down the on-ramps. Hardly any traffic on EastLink before the Penlink interchange.

If I heard the ABC announcer correctly, traffic was not in short supply because everyone was on Penlink – au contraire, traffic was in short supply because the north bound lanes did not open til after I had passed the interchange.

Eastlink and then the Eastern Fwy were both quiet. I got to work in 1 hour and 5 mins. Perhaps my watch was eating magic mushrooms? Maybe there won’t be much traffic til after the Australia Day weekend?

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I left Thomastown for the return journey at 4.00

The Eastern Fwy was a carpark from Chandler Hwy, right through to the first few sections of Eastlink, where the tolls are.

At some point the signs advising how many minutes to subsequent exits showed it was only 19 minutes to the Frankston Fwy. There was a red line [red being a don’t bother sort of colour] on the sign from Thompsons Rd on. Overhead signs advised there had been an “incident on Penlink” and that we should “expect delays”.

I took the Thompsons Rd exit, giving myself a pat on the back for being in the left lane and able to escape the stalled traffic a few hundred metres further on. Thompsons Rd took me past the worst of it, then led me back on to the FKN Fwy. The lanes heading to Portsea [via Penlink] were strangely uncluttered.

Perhaps I had been eating magic mushrooms myself?

At Kananook Railway Station I took the North Frankston exit [just before Skye Rd]. Traffic has often been banked up from Kananook to the Cranbourne Frankston Rd, and weaving through local traffic is probably no quicker but definitely less frustrating than crawling along a freeway. From Beach Street I saw the traffic jam beginning at Kananook had evaporated and that I could have stayed on the FKN Fwy to the bitter end, after all.

Stuck in Beach Street I plodded along, coming to a messy halt where the roundabout is being re-somethinged. As it was re-somethinged only about a year ago, I hope “they” will find some way to deal with the traffic that builds up waiting to get onto the Cranbourne-Frankston Rd.

Finally got onto the C-F Rd, grateful I was only 3 minutes from home. Well, it would have been only 3 minutes if the traffic had been moving. I suspect a lot of Langwarrin residents were spewing. I sensed some kind of mass disappointment in the air: Penlink was going to change our lives forever. Struggling to move along the C-F Rd was hardly the change anyone was looking for. Maybe the C-F Rd was just incident affected?

I hope that was the reason but, if so, I hope there are not too many incidents ahead.