Fursday night once more, in dear old Brisbane town. Well it's been a week of motoring mayhem with the Riverside expressway cracking up, and all the poor little petrolheads finding themselves queing up endlessly, as I breeze on past on the busway- ipod groovin' away, reading matter of my choice and not a care in the world as they gnaw at their own livers and fulmiate against the uncaring spring morning sunshine. Kind of instant Karma when oil/auto industry mouthpiece ke Willet of RACQ comes out frothing how the bad ol' government spends all this money on public transport that should rightly be ashpalting the universe. This is the same clown who believes 'induced traffic demand' is a myth whilst ignoring all the documented evidence to the contrary, especially the M5 East in Sydney, instant traffic jam once opened, and rail patronage down 8 percent in to the bargain. Road building is just pissing away good money after bad when it is part of a 'bigger pipe' solution. Besides, once you build it, you gotta maintain it (and the rest of it you've built already). In any event, the least efficient way to utilise a lane on the road is to fill it with cars. Each car utilises not only the area that it physically occupies, but also half of the separation distance before and after the vehicle, which increases with the speed of travel. Given that the average private car occupancy is 1.1 persons per vehicle, this represents a massive increase in the amount of lane space compared to someone on a half-full bus travelling at the same speed, so as Mr Willet lobbied the BCC to remove the bus lanes on Bowen Bridge Road, he actually REDUCED the capacity of the road in peak hour to shift people, from what was possible under even a poorly patronised rail corridor- what a win that was! Naturally, a proportion of the bus passengers, having lost their priority probably shifted back to cars, thus further increasing the congestion. That served the public interest, as does Can-do Campbell's underground traffic sewer system and extraneous bridge program. Why have we (collectively using public money) spent a fortune revitalising Southbank into the most human scaled part of this fair town, only to ram the Hale Street Traffic Jam through it, destroying all the amenity that has been introduced over the last 10 years. South Brisbane is a peninsula, there are only a couple of ways in or out, so there is no logic in either a transport planning or urban structure sense in pumping all this traffic through it. To alleviate one bottleneck, simply exacerbate another one in Mater Hill, outside the Children's Hospital. This proposal will simultaneously clog up Vulture Street, Stanley Street, Annerley Road, Gladstone Road, Fairfield Road and Ipswich Road, not to mention Cordelia and Merivale Streets, all to 'solve' a single traffic problem on the northside.
Sheer brillance I must say, as was that remark attributed to Einstein "insanity is repeating the same mistake, yet expecting different results" [or words to that effect].
Rant over,
bye for now
