FORK IN THE ROAD
BULLETIN CAMPAIGN Callout to name and fix city’s worst roads, footpaths
GOLD Coasters have been challenged to name and shame the city’s roads and footpaths in urgent need of upgrades to ease our growing frustration.
Incumbent Mayor Tom Tate has thrown his support behind the Bulletin campaign and says, if re-elected next month, he would use the list to dramatically increase road spending and fast-track works.
GOLD Coasters, tell us what needs to be fixed.
With this year’s council election now officially under way, the Bulletin is putting out a call to Gold Coast residents to name the road and footpath upgrades that urgently need work to help ease our growing frustration with traffic congestion and road maintenance.
Incumbent Mayor Tom Tate, who is running for reelection at next month’s council poll, backed the Bulletin’s call and said he would welcome all proposed road projects. He vowed to dramatically increase council’s road spending to get the works fast tracked.
“If re-elected, I will collate these into a citywide spreadsheet and ask Council to find immediate solutions to the issues identified by locals,’’ he said. “My call-to-action will ask every motorist, and resident, to name their local bottleneck or traffic issue.’’
Cr Tate said if re-elected, he would present the local action report to all incoming councillors, and to one of the first full council meetings following the March 28 election.
Griffith University transport expert Associate Professor Matthew Burke said the Glitter Strip’s road network was struggling as the city’s population continues to grow, and with the population expected to hit 1 million within 20 years it was only going to get worse.
“We know what lines within the transport grid tend to clog up each morning and afternoon,” he said.
“We have a large number of people making longer journeys who are in the poorer suburbs and have a disproportionate longer travel time because they can’t afford to live in Burleigh or Isle of Capri.”
The Infrastructure Australia Urban Transport Crowding and Congestion report released last year predicted road congestion costs would quadruple by 2031, taking $973 million out of the pockets of Gold Coast motorists as they sit in gridlock.
The worst of it will be on the Pacific Motorway, where delays will cost Coast commuters $1.2 million a day.
The Gold Coast City Council mid-last year voted to approve its 2031 transport strategy’s midlife review, which includes a list of more than 41 projects that will be funded and built by the council and state by 2023 at a cost of $544 million.
Among the biggest projects are the $34 million upgrade of Sundale Bridge, the $34 million new bridge to Surfers
Paradise as part of the Isle of Capri decongestion project and widening of Pimpama’s Yawalpah Rd.
There are also 13 major intersection upgrades planned as well as footpaths and green bridges, including a new connection between Chevron
Island and Surfers Paradise.
Associate Professor Burke said an increased focus on public transport and interconnected infrastructure such as green bridges would help alleviate some of the stresses on the road network. “The Gold Coast is a city which has grown up around the car and that was fine up until the population grew beyond 500,000,” he said.
“Now we are living with the legacy of past leaders not investing in public transport but this has thankfully changed in recent years. What we really
lack is the public transport infrastructure that other cities of similar sizes have.”
Some of the Gold Coast’s mayoral candidates have proposed ways of minimising the stress on the city's roads.
Cr Tate has called for an investigation into automated driverless buses possible eastwest connection between the light and heavy rails.
Mayoral candidate Mona Hecke has also talked up improving road infrastructure and recently proposed decentralising the council’s headquarters to three locations –
Southport, Coomera and Robina in a bid to take cars off the roads.
“It is really important we start looking at how people (will) use the Coomera connector and the M1 – a lot of people in those inter-regional areas use (the M1) to hop on
and off to get between suburbs,” she told a UDIA mayoral forum. “We need to make sure those transport corridors are better planned so they are not congesting the M1 with those short trips.”
IT’S hard to believe it’s been 35 years since the beloved film Back to the Future came out.
In that 1985 film’s final scene, Doc Brown, speaking of the year 2015, famously said “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads”.
Unfortunately, this proved not to be true of the Gold Coast in 2015 and certainly not in 2020.
The legacy of the Gold Coast as a linear city is coming home to roost, with a road network that was never designed to take the sheer number of people we have living here.
Now, with the population set to swell beyond 1 million people within 20 years, the time is now to be planning for the future and building with this in mind. And it’s going to cost a pretty penny. The Gold Coast Bulletin is today calling on all residents to step up and name the road or transport-related projects they believe need to happen in the next five years.
There is just four weeks to go until Gold Coasters go to the polls to vote on the next council and determine the course of the next four years.
So now is the time to make your voices heard and tell our politicians, both those currently in office and those seeking it, what you need in your suburb – no matter how big or small.
Incumbent Mayor Tom Tate, who is seeking a third term in office, has already come on board and vowed to spend millions more on road upgrades as named by locals. He says a list of road and transport upgrades, everything from council roads to footpaths, will be looked at and considered for fast-tracked funding at this year’s budget if he is re-elected.
This is a welcomed step on a long road to fixing our transport woes.
It was once famously said that decisions are made by those who turn up, and Gold Coasters now have a very real opportunity to change things for the better in their suburb.
Speak up and make a difference.