Easy steps to a busy CBD

DOES the Cairns Regional Council want to breathe life back into the CBD? Here’s how in eight easy steps.

1. Maximise the traffic flow. Return to four lanes. Streets are the city’s arteries and you’ve given them atherosclerosis.

2. Maximise the parking. It’s a tropical city. Walking = sweating. Trees don’t need to be in car-sized beds.

3. Make the first hour’s parking free. Each additional hour can get more costly to encourage turnover.

4. Return to individual meters. Coin or card. No dashboard tickets. Convenience is essential. So what if the next user gets a few free minutes.

5. Give six months free rates to empty shop owners who give six months free rent to new tenants.

6. Install additional public toilets. Again, convenience is essential.

7. Shift “pedestrian spaces” to the Esplanade. Malls in the CBD facilitate criminal activity, especially at night.

8. Stop pretending the CBD can be made like indoor centres, such as Cairns Central. A CBD is a different model entirely.

You can have a very green, pretty but lifeless CBD or you can have a utilitarian, functional but busy CBD.

You’ve already proven you can’t have a very green, pretty, busy CBD.

Peter Campion, Tolga 1912: The Commonwealth Bank of Australia opens its doors for the first time as a savings bank.

1916: Boeing Co, originally known as Pacific Aero Products, is founded in Seattle, Washington, by William Boeing. 1945: Italy declares war on Japan, its

former Axis partner in World War II. 2013: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says the government will scrap the fixed carbon price and move to the emissions trading scheme a year early.

2015: Brisbane estate agent Gerard Baden-Clay (above) is jailed for life for the murder of his wife Allison - later downgraded to manslaughter on appeal.

2017: A plan to resettle refugee detainees held in an Australian-run offshore detention centre in America is thrown into doubt after US officials interviewing the refugees leave the facility abruptly.