COUNTDOWN TO GRIDLOCK
AS Treasurer Curtis Pitt said in bringing down the State Budget yesterday, the Gold Coast is just 10 months away from hosting one of the biggest sporting events in the world.
Excitement is building. For commuters, so is a feeling of dread.
There is a frantic rush of jobs to try to improve transport in time for the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
But what the Budget contained yesterday for Gold Coast transport was not new.
Funding for projects such as widening Bundall Rd and the light rail extension to link with heavy rail at Helensvale has been previously announced and indeed, the projects are well advanced. There was some money for widening the M1 between Mudgeeraba and Reedy Creek, but that does not kick in until after the Games.
Drivers and businesses meanwhile are being urged to change habits to avoid peak times, but no matter what is done between now and April, our showpiece Games will also deliver transport headaches. Worse, what we experience on our roads over a couple of weeks in April will be just a taste of the future of transport in this city.
It isn’t pretty, unless there is a massive injection of new funding in infrastructure.
It is a problem as old as government in this country. Always playing catch-up; rarely providing what’s needed in advance.
Brisbane’s multibillion-dollar cross-river rail project will be a plus at last for train commuters. Fixing the bottleneck in the heart of Brisbane will allow extra services between the cities.
However the lack of any commitment to stage three of the light rail system hurts, since the inevitable clogging of arterial roads and suburban streets in our linear city can only be fixed with a much more efficient tram and bus network running not only north-south, but east-west.
Also missing is a commitment to build an alternative to the M1, which is rapidly nearing maximum capacity.
Like it or not, unless there is a radical improvement in services, rail cannot solve the problem of mass movement between the population centres.
The line cannot handle freight traffic either, which means increasing numbers of heavy trucks on the motorway.