City Bypass or City Distributor?

Over the past 15 years or so, building inner city bypass roads has become all the rage in Australia. Melbourne kicked things off with the massive CityLink project. Perth built the Graham Farmer Freeway, Brisbane the Inner City Bypass and Sydney the contentious cross-city tunnel. Even Adelaide has a bypass road linking Richmond with North Adelaide.

At the time these projects were sold as 'linking' the two sides of the city, catering for the massive demand for cross-suburban traffic and "reducing congestion" on inner city streets. Campaigners at the time argued stridently (but ultimately fruitlessly) against the projects, arguing that the verifiable demand for cross-suburban travel was low, and that if inner city streets were clogged, this was because of the demand for travel to the inner city areas. It was feared that these roads would act more as city distributors, making it easier to drive to the inner city (and competing with public transport where it was most efficient). The other fear was that by making long distance cross city commuting easier it would induce such travel, to the long term detriment of the city.

Now living in East Perth, I can see that in the case of the Graham Farmer, the first of these predictions has become true. Every evening from around 4.30 to 6.00 pm, the roads leading from the CBD through residential East Perth become clogged with traffic leading to the one westbound on ramp for the freeway. In other words, the Graham Farmer is acting as a massive city distributor being used for people commuting from the City to the Northwest suburbs of Perth.

I can't help wondering also if the problems the cross-city tunnel in Sydney are having are caused by the road being genuinely configured as a 'bypass' and thus useless for the majority of drivers.

I'd love to hear from people in other states who have experience with their 'city bypasses': are they real bypasses, or have they become massive city distributors to aid CBD and inner-city based commuting?