Burke's seen the highway's problems from above and he says we need to go below

"There is no short-term fix [for the highway] because what in the name of god can you do through Blackheath?" he says.

"It runs along a ridgeline.

"I've been a pilot for 37 years and I've taken [state Member for Bathurst] Paul Toole and a whole heap of them over there on a Sunday afternoon on a long weekend and just shown them: it's just absolutely chaotic.

"And there's no way around Blackheath."

The former owner of Bathurst company Burke's Transport and passionate Great Western Highway critic is more convinced than ever that the only way to solve the problems of the current road is to go underneath it.

"I think they've got to start boring," he said. "I really do.

"I don't think there's any alternative out of it.

"They've looked at all the options."

There had been proposals for an expressway on Bells Line, he said, but "more money was spent on studies than what there could have been to build that highway" and then there was the problem of having the traffic funnelled into Richmond and Windsor.

"With the Great Western Highway, you either go back down to the bottom of Lapstone Hill [near Penrith] and into that area there and you build a brand new highway all up through the valleys or you've got to bite the bullet and put a tunnel in," he said.

Starting in Sydney, drivers can take dual lanes north all the way to Brisbane and south all the way to Melbourne, but the dual lanes running west only go a fraction of the way, ending at Katoomba, he said.

"What irks me more than anything in the world is that it would now have to be at least 30 or 35 years ago that they started the duplication at the bottom of the Nepean River, which is called Lapstone Hill, and they moved west with it.

"Now you can't tell me, 35 years ago, that somebody with half a brain in planning would have said, once this gets to the Marked Tree, which is just the western side of Katoomba, the dual lanes are going to stop because we then run across the ridge of the Mountains.

"So it was almost, oh well, we'll just keep on doing these dual lanes until we get up to the Marked Tree and then what are we going to do?

"Wouldn't the smart thing have been, let's start at the east and let's start at the west and meet in the middle [with a tunnel]?"

Great Western Highway upgrades

Massive trucks continue to rumble over the almost 200-year-old convict bridge at Mount Victoria, which was built for bullock drays, he said.

"Now we're going over there with B-doubles that are grossing in excess of 60 tonnes.

"You get two B-doubles that meet in the centre of that bridge, one coming down and one going up, that's 120 tonnes across that convict bridge.

"I'm bewildered, absolutely bewildered, why it hasn't had a load limit put on it.

"I just can't understand it.

"I would doubt very, very much there would be another 200-year-old bridge on any national highway in Australia."

Mr Burke said both levels of government simply need to accept that the Great Western Highway is not adequate.

"It's really stunting the growth of the west as far as Bathurst and Orange and Dubbo and all of those places are concerned.

"I think truly it has stunted our growth out this way."

THE NSW Government is continuing work on duplications of small sections of the Great Western Highway at Medlow Bath (worth $174 million) and Little Hartley (worth $232 million).

A more ambitious overall plan to duplicate the entire stretch of the highway from Lithgow to Katoomba has been shelved for the moment.

When she was in Bathurst before Christmas, state Regional Transport Minister Jenny Aitchison said the Federal Government's infrastructure review had put the east and west section duplications of the highway from Lithgow to Katoomba "completely on hold" and "what we're saying is that we are working with them".

"They want to do strategic corridor assessments and they have highlighted this as one that needs to be done," she said.