Ms Farrelly said she would like the dangerous Bells Line of Road to stay the way it is, as “safety is not the only value” of a road.

Thirteen people have died on the road in the last five years, with countless other accidents. 

The Bells Line of Road and Great Western Highway are two of the most dangerous roads in Australia. 

Ms Farrelly described the Bells Line of Road as being “thrilling to the mountain poetic, the frisson of danger and, like those early explorers, the sheer luck of being alive.”

 Ms Farelly suggests that maybe those who wish to drive safely and quickly through the Blue mountains should stick to the Great Western Highway. 

 What do you think of Ms Farrelly opinon on the The Bells Line of Road. Should it be allowed to stay the way it is, or should it be upgraded? Take our poll and comment below. 

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Choosing the road to adventure

By Elizabeth Farrelly

A mountain crossing, a ruined pub, a town sucked dry, a picturesque trail under threat.

On Saturday, as we collapse into our mojitos after the citywide SUV-seizure that is the school sport diaspora, we might spare a thought for the road-making venture that, exactly two centuries earlier, started it all.

We might also consider what that first Blue Mountains crossing means for our road-making 200 years into the future.

After lunch on Tuesday, May 11, 1813, 16 exotic mammals powered only by their own 50 legs and a decent dollop of testosterone set off from South Creek, St Marys. The Blue Mountains - a name as redolent as The Hungry Mile - were Sydney's rampart. They were the beyond-which-not, the shark-infested sea, the end of the possible.

So the explorers must have been conscious that their venture, this first scrape of teaspoon against rock, constituted an attack on the prison wall. But they could not have known how fast and emphatically it would transform the prison colony into a nation.

Farmer Gregory Blaxland (35), surveyor Lt. William Lawson (39) and Acting Provost-Marshall William C. Wentworth (21) were accompanied by convict Samuel Fairs (46), two other convicts, an unnamed guide, four pack-horses and five dogs. They pitched camp that first night at Emu Island (now Emu Plains) on the Nepean and, at nine the following morning, began the arduous climb.

And honestly? I'd rather be with them than the mojito mums. Call me romantic, but I'd sacrifice the clink of ice-cubes and the tang of minted lime for billy tea and creaky leather any day. Yet the thrill of the adventure, and the riches it unlocked, mustn't blind us to its destructive consequences. For where some is good, more is not necessarily better.

They're still pretty rugged, those big ole mountains. From down here in the basin, they can seem a bit twee, but that's because we see the tarot readers and weekend cottages as the whole, not just marker-buoys for what lies beneath. The real Blue Mountains are as treasure-laden as Peer Gynt's hall, and as dangerous.

Seventeen days in, the explorers gazed upon what Wentworth described as ''an abundant crop of grass of an Excellent quality … superior as a grazing Country to any land on this side of the Mountain''. Unable to get far past Mount York, with their shoes shredded and supplies gone, they were obliged to head home.

But it was enough. Their discovery of the vast inland pastures was attended by wonderment worthy of Ice Age. At Macquarie's command it was quickly followed by George Evans' survey, all the way to Bathurst and, the following winter, by Cox's Road.

The colony's main highway, until then, was the Parramatta Road, still so dangerously rutted as to lame horses on a regular basis. Yet Macquarie briefed Cox for a road at least 12 feet (3.7 metres) wide ''so as to permit two carts or other wheeled carriages to pass each other with ease''.

Covering 101.5 miles (163 kilometres) of the colony's most difficult terrain, William Cox built his road in seven months. (Compare this with the years the RMS has spent so far on ''improving'' the same road, and still only half done).

The effect was dramatic. Sheep poured through, like they were the ones imprisoned, headfirst to the grasslands of genuine economy. Within a decade, one-third of the colony's sheep grazed west of the mountains. By 1830, wool had surpassed whaling and by 1840 Australia was safely on the sheep's back.

By then, too, a second road had been marked out, following the Dharug trail from Richmond to Lithgow. The Bells Line of Road (best road name ever) was well-used during the gold rushes, yet it remained unsealed until after World War II, when fear of attack suggested a need to have an evacuation route for Sydney.

It remained steep, narrow, winding and breathtakingly lovely.

It's also dangerous - though not dangerous by Lawson and Wentworth's standards, of course; just by the standards of the nanny state. Question is, should it be allowed to stay that way?

Or should it go the way of Cox's Road which has been gradually smoothed and widened and straightened over its 200 years transforming first, with one or two deviations, into the Great Western Highway and then, under the RMS' tender care, into a flavourless, super-smooth mega-highway, 10 times its original width and more than 10 times as fast.

I like engineers, as you know. I like their frankness, usefulness and (yes) modesty. But road engineers are the worst. Drunk on power given them by the roads lobby - which is to NSW as the gun lobby is to America - road engineers are dangerous at the wheel.

An image on the RMS website, publicising their triumph over the GWH, reads ''Lawson Pub in a revitalised town centre''. What, do they think we're blind?

The picture shows Lawson's gothicky, veranda-encircled pub, heritaged to death, adrift in a concrete ocean half a middie-sized stumble from a roaring eight-lane freeway.

Town centre? Revitalised? There's more life in a precast gutter on a dry day than in your post-RMS mountain town.

I know what you're going to say. A road is a conduit, and flow depends on width. The GWH road was a bottleneck, a hazard. Speed is important, as is safety. All that.

I know it because these are the arguments currently aimed by the RMS against their next target, the Bells Line of Road. The Bells' crash record - 54 per 100 million vehicle kilometres, or 13 fatalities over five years - is roughly twice that of a standard rural NSW road.

But a road is not just a conduit. It is also an experience, a place, a thing-in-itself. And safety is not the only value. There's also diversity. Choice. So perhaps speed-freaks and pragmatists should take the ultra-fast, ultra-wide flavourless concrete mega-route through these fabled, chasm-riven mountains.

And the rest of us can go with the being-there option, the Bells Line of Road, thrilling to the mountain poetic, the frisson of danger and, like those early explorers, the sheer luck of being alive.