Article: Pollies happy to sleep on answers to transport woes

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Pollies happy to sleep on answers to transport woes

Pollies happy to sleep on answers to transport woes
Article from: The Courier-Mail

By Mike O'Connor

April 07, 2008 12:00am

SLEEP well in your beds tonight for the State Government has discovered that there are traffic and public transport problems in southeast Queensland.

You might have noticed just a hint of these yourself as you tried to make your way around the city and found it blocked by an endless congestion of cars, trucks and buses.

Perhaps you suspected that something might have been amiss when your bus left you standing at the roadside because not another soul could be squeezed on board.

Or ? when your train roared through the station without stopping ? passengers' faces squeezed flat against the carriage windows.

It was possible, of course, that we were imagining this chaos, for no one in Government appeared to be even remotely concerned. We were living in the Smart State, after all, and the perpetual picket-fence grin stapled to our then Premier's face told us that everything was hunky-dory.

What a relief it was last week, then, to learn that there really were problems and that they were not a product of our fevered minds.

How do we know this? Because Premier Anna Bligh is setting up a special unit to look at growing congestion and has made the finding of solutions a priority.

A priority? The quality of lifestyle in this city has been deteriorating for the past 10 years and now the Government has decided to make the issue a priority?

Apparently the awesome, intellectual firepower of the entire Cabinet is to be brought to bear on traffic and transport problems. One cannot help but tremble at the prospect.

Sometimes it feels as if we are extras in an ongoing political satire. The only element missing is a laugh track, replete with peals of canned mirth greeting the latest pronouncement from the Executive Building.

"Congestion? What congestion? That's not congestion. It's an aberrant fluctuation in normal traffic flow which, when statistically adjusted for seasonal factors, can be proven not to exist."

Suddenly, after a decade of staring out of their office windows at the ever-worsening chaos in the streets below, our politicians acknowledge there could be a problem. Brilliant! Absolutely bloody brilliant!

One of the first decisions to flow from this shocking realisation that all is not well in Gotham City has been to scrap a western bypass, uplifting news for commuters who spend half their lives in traffic on the Western Freeway.

Why? According to Transport Minister Paul Lucas, the reason the Government won't build either of the two roads proposed is that "the numbers do not stack up".

How handy. He was referring to traffic-flow numbers but the numbers that would most concern the Minister would be those reflecting the local residents who might vote against the Government if the road was built through the western suburbs of Brookfield and The Gap.

If the road was built, people would use it. It's that simple.

Once more, a government has folded in the face of a possible electoral backlash. Forget the greater good. Let's pander to individual pressure groups, the same groups that created the insane situation of the bridge between Dutton Park and St Lucia that doesn't carry cars. Not in my back yard, mate!

But what of the good news?

To solve the western suburbs vehicular logjam, Lucas said that, instead of a road, the Government would build a tunnel connecting Toowong to Stafford, a distance of 8km.

Really? When will this be built?

Don't know. Who'll pay for it?

Not sure.

How much will it cost?

Haven't the foggiest.

Will it be a toll road?

Maybe. Maybe not.

It may not have the faintest idea what to do about these manifest problems but, when it comes to creating verbal ordure, the Government has few peers. Try this from Lucas: "We are actively looking at a range of options that will make a significant difference to traffic and public transport in southeast Queensland in the future."

Translation?

"Don't hold your breath."

There is no plan. There are plans to have plans and plans to have more plans but there is no Plan.

There is just political opportunism and a lack of intestinal fortitude.

As well as the tunnel, henceforth to be known as The Tunnel In the Sky, Lucas rattled off a number of other grandiose schemes but it requires little insight to realise that they are light-years from realisation.

"Some are unlikely to be built within 25 years," he said, but even that's a guess and he knows it.

Pick a number: 25, 35, 45?

The Government might congratulate itself on having wriggled out of the water crisis, but the stark fact is that it got lucky. It rained. It might not have rained but it did. But it's not going to start raining the bridges, tunnels and freeways we need any time soon.

I'm fond of Brisbane and it disheartens me to see it being ruined by those who cannot or will not look any further than the next election.

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It would seem that once again our Politicians are wearing blinkers or maybe they were the recipiants of sucessful lobotomies carried out at taxpayers costs by our excelent health services.

At the present time they are engaged in extending the Centenary Highway to join with the cunningham Highway at Ripley.  Currently the Centenary Highway is beyond its capacity at peak, without the additional traffic that current extensions to the south west will bring, to build a bypass as an extension of that route is shortsighted madness.

The Centenary Highway is at its limit now so to cope what will by then be needed will be an eight lane Centenary Highway.

The less than politicialy expedient route branching off the Warrego and Cunningham Highways at Dinmore via Bellbowrie,Pullenvale, The Gap, Brookfield, Arana Hills and Albany Creek, and Strathpine connecting with the Gympie Arterial and the Gateway Arterial in the region their junction would provide an almost complete outter ring road around Brisbane, the missing link would be the section Bellbowrie and the Logan Motorway at Gailes.

Yes it will be unpopular with many along the route but it is needed and those same people who will loudly object (the NIMBY brigade will be the those who in time it will benefit as will the greater community but the time for such a project is now not in thirty years time when it will cause more disruption and greater cost to the taxpayer.

Of course more, better public transport would reduce the need but the eventual need would still remain.

Had the Goodna Bypass been continued with it would have been a start and still could be.  Two extra traffic lanes as are currently being built on the Ipswich Motorway do not provide an alternative route in the event of a Major Chemical Spill and the present Government seems to be favouring a Toowoomba terminal for the Inland rail with an extra 1000 B Doubles a day added to the traffic mix on the Ipswich Motorway and Warrego Highways.

One must question if the right hand knows what the Left is doing or indeed if there are two hands.

Ask your local Member.

Cheers.