Daily dice with danger shows why Mt Ousley footbridge needs to be reinstated

"I don't want to hang out there for too long," she says.

"You really get the cars speeding through, getting back onto the freeway and off the freeway."

A little way down from where the Mount Pleasant woman is trying to cross, school children leaving Elonera Montessori school are also navigating the various narrow crossings on the road.

And teenagers from Keira and Wollongong high schools are starting to make their way home for the afternoon, many of them heading into the suburbs directly to the north which feed into the schools, which are across Mount Ousley Road.

Ms Rooksby, and a representative from the Montessori school, were among numerous speakers at a Monday public meeting hosted by community groups who are angry that the NSW Government has deleted a planned pedestrian over-bridge which was, for the past eight years, part of the $390 million Mount Ousley Interchange.

After awarding the tender in January for Fulton Hogan to build the massive project, which is now in the early stages of the construction, Transport for NSW revealed last month that there would be some changes to the way it was built.

A pedestrian bridge, which would have joined Dumfries Avenue near McMahon Avenue to pedestrian and cycle links on the other side of Mount Ousley Road, was gone.

And roundabouts in the earlier design had been replaced by traffic signals.

The reason, according to Transport NSW, was to "deliver value for money" and preserve an alternative heavy freight link to Port Kembla which would allow large trucks to travel down old Mount Ousley Road and into the Wollongong CBD along Corrimal Street.

Ms Rooksby, who uses her bike to access Keiraville or Wollongong about most days of the week, said she was devastated to see the bridge removed.

"The pedestrian and cycling bridge that was going to be part of the project, and was in there from 2016, was the silver lining and the one big win for the community out of this project," she said.

"I live locally and I'm often riding around when the school kids are there, and you can see that there's hundreds of kids on the road at the beginning and the end of the school day."

"We need walking tracks and cycle tracks that are integrated to allow those kids a safe passage and increase the accessibility between the schools and the northern suburbs."

Keiraville Residents Action Group representative Felix Bronneberg said more than 100 people had turned up to a public meeting at Wisemans Park Bowling Club on Monday night, unanimously passing several resolutions in an offer to get the NSW Government to change its mind about the deletion of the bridge.

"We called on the state and federal governments to reinstate the the pedestrian and cycling bridge as originally planned," he said.

They also thanked the federal government for the extra $72 million funding for the project, but called on this to be contingent upon the state government using money freed up to include the pedestrian bridge crossing.

"The community also urged the attendees at the meeting to write to local state and federal members of parliament urging the restatement of the bridge," Mr Bronneberg said

"And a combined delegation of community groups will endeavour to meet with local MPs."

"The great attendance at the meeting is an indication of the feeling there is out there in the community, on both sides of the road, in support of the reinstatement of the bridge."

He said the public meeting had also covered the issue of the freight route, and believed it was not impossible to build a bridge that would allow for heavy transport to use the road.

"That bridge would have to be 6.5 metres high for transport to be able to use that route to back and forth from the port, and that's just a little bit over one metre higher than was originally planned," Mr Bronneberg said.

"It can't be impossible to build a bridge that's high enough - it sounds like it's just as an implausible excuse because they need to save money."

"This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to have a safe crossing built over Mount Ousley Road, close to the university as part of this project. If it doesn't go ahead, now, it's unlikely that it will ever be built."