BOAT SERVICE A NO-BRAINER

THE Gold Coast needs a ferry service.

It needs it for tourism, for our clogged roadways and to open up our magnificent waterways to a broader appreciation.

Council has estimated its proposed ferry service would remove about 3200 cars from our roads each day.

Chiefly they would be motorists who would otherwise drive up to Sea World and Marina Mirage on The Spit peninsula – one of our city’s most notorious bottlenecks.

With a ferry service, they would just as likely park at Bruce Bishop car park at Surfers Paradise or Mal Burke car park at Southport and hop on to a ferry to those destinations.

Nobody is suggesting this is a silver bullet.

But it is a bullet in a broad arsenal to take on our biggest existential challenge: congestion.

Building bigger roads is also part of the solution – but alone that is a rotten solution.

Big, dynamic cities have one thing in common the world over – a diverse and integrated transport system.

We have one thing in abundance on the Gold Coast – waterways.

We have twice as many canals as Venice. So the question should be not whether we should get ferries – it should be why haven’t we already?

It is a lay-down misere that once these vessels grace our waterways, they will quickly become enshrined in our daily life.

Tourists and commuters alike will flock to them.

As residents in Sydney’s more affluent harbourside suburbs will attest, there is no more pleasant method of transport.

Moreover, Sydney ferries are now one of the city’s most potent tourism magnets – what better and cheaper way to enjoy its magnificent harbour.

This idea must not be viewed with an immediate return on investment as the sole determinant of its merit.

A ferry service represents a long-term investment in the city for both its residents and our massive tourism industry.

From a tourism viewpoint it is a no-brainer. We have the marvel of our vast water network yet it hardly registers with tourists.

The reason is simple: there has never been a concerted effort to leverage this amazing asset.

But in order to realise this dream we need both courage and conviction from our political leaders.

Mayor Tom Tate deserves credit for his support to this point.

But we need more community leaders to back him and make this a reality.

We cannot afford to let the naysayers cruel this project as they have so many others.

The last time ferries on the GC were given serious consideration back in 2007, they were ultimately killed off by a noisy minority concerned chiefly about ferry speeds and the impact of the vessels’ wake on the shoreline.

It’s 2018. We have sent men to the moon and landed craft on Mars. Surely we can come up with a practical engineering solution that will allay such Chicken Littles.

It’s time we got behind building a bigger and better Gold Coast that still enshrines our beautiful environment.

Let’s start the boats.