TRAM VIEW LACKS VISION

GREAT cities are built on the back of vital infrastructure, including efficient public transport.

They are built from the ideas and drive of people with vision, yet three elected representatives are showing a lack of this – at least as far as delivering light rail where it is wanted and badly needed.

The NIMBY syndrome might be a cliché, but it applies in the thinking of state MPs Jann Stuckey and Michael Hart, and Councillor Daphne McDonald, all of whom pay lip service to the need for light rail and then throw in an unworkable proviso.

Oh, we’re in favour of light rail, they say, but just don’t run it down the logical route of the Gold Coast Highway.

Mr Hart’s vision has it detouring away from where most people live or want to play, taking it instead out into the industrial areas where fewer people live and where it would have to link with a heavy rail extension to the border – and that train line just doesn’t exist.

This argument highlights several points. One is that every time the Gold Coast attempts a project that will lift it above the pack, providing a huge boost to tourism and commuter infrastructure, there is always a loud, self-centred lobby group that conducts a hysterical campaign of opposition that frightens the local pollies. We saw it with The Spit, we saw it with the instrument landing system for Gold Coast Airport, and now we see it with the light rail extension south, which is badly needed.

That raises the second major point. Despite the bleatings of the opposition lobby, most people in the city agree the tram route must push south down that highway to the airport.

That is the whole point of efficient and well-patronised public transport. It runs frequently where it is needed and where the people live, and that is along the coast. People want quick and easy access to work, to the beach, and to the airport.

Mr Hart is correct however to want heavy rail to be pushed south from Varsity Lakes to Coolangatta. Amid the excitement of developing light rail, heavy rail has dropped below the radar.

But the trams will not provide a stand-alone solution. Of course they will form the spine of a workable public transport system, but for the entire city transport network to operate properly, the M1 must be widened so through-traffic does not attempt to seek alternatives like the Gold Coast Highway, and heavy rail must go through to the border for the huge numbers of commuters who need that alternative.