vobiblog

The Riverside Expressway has been reopened, petrol is under $1/litre and life is returning to normal. How long this normality will last is another story. The closure was caused by a couple of two metre cracks found in two of the off ramps that were discovered during standard resurfacing works. Officials, not wanting a repeat of the fatal overpass collapse in Canada only weeks earlier, closed the freeway without warning.

Within hours of the closure last week, Lord Mayor Can-Do Campbell Newman was on the blower to anyone who cared to listen. The message was roads, roads and more roads and why building more roads is more critical than ever. While the congestion probably wasn’t as bad as it could have been, there is no doubt that it caused a lot of angst for the residents of this drive-in utopia Brisbane. By weeks end, Premier Pete had weighed into the debate on more river crossings and pledged his support to the Hale Street to West End toll bridge. It would be easy for someone to say that the powers that be have everything under control yet there is evidence to suggest that real planning and foresight by our political leaders has been lacking for some time.

The story begins in the 1960s. Brisbane had a small, but effective 80km tram network. In its hey day, it carried more people per year than Melbourne’s heavy rail system carries today. Folk law says that Clem Jones, the then mayor of Brisbane brought in the American town planners (Wilbur Smith Assoc.) who advised him to dismantle the tram network and build more roads. It sounded like a good idea, after all it was working in Los Angeles. In 1962, the Paddington Tram Depot burnt to the ground, with 65 trams destroyed in the process. This event signalled the end for Brisbane’s tram network. Construction for The Riverside Express way began in 1968 and the last tram ran the following year with all routes replaced by diesel buses. Despite buses being more flexible than trams, services became less frequent and was followed by a subsequent decline in patronage.

Enter the 1970s. Political turmoil and oil price fluctuations keep the growth in private car use relatively low. However, this all changed in the 1980s. Cheap fuel, mass migration from the southern states and unrestrained development of farm land changed the shape of Brisbane forever. So much so that today we talk about the region of vast development – South East Queensland – rather than Brisbane as an individual city. The South East Queensland we have created is one that is almost impossible for anyone to traverse without a car. People routinely spend hours a day commuting to and from work, to school, to the shop, to just about anywhere. 150,000 of these people drive on The Riverside Expressway every day. You can imagine what happens when a road that carries that many people just closes without notice.

The case for Newman’s Trans-Apex vision of an autotropolis has been strengthened. Yet there are signs that even during this era of unprecedented economic growth, something is not quite right. The free way closure has shown that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain this incredibly inefficient transport infrastructure. Infrastructure our lives have become dependant on. We can’t go back to the past but there is still time to take a long hard look about where we are heading in the future. The twin peaks of global warming and oil depletion will have an unprecedented impact on the way we live our lives. If we can’t maintain this infrastructure now, what is the situation going to be like in another 30 years.

The closure demonstrated just how dependant we have become on the car. No doubt some bright spark in the government said thought it would be a good idea to put more buses on the road, called up Brisbane City Council to make it happen, only to find out that Brisbane is already facing a chronic shortage of buses with very limited funding to buy more. They said they would run more trains, but they would be largely inaccessible to those most dependent on the freeway, those who live on the Gold Coast line due to the track already running at capacity during peak hours. Infrastructure at all levels has been neglected in favour of funding shiny and new politically motivated projects.

Now is the time to look at the way we live, the way we build our cities and the way we go about life in them. While investment in public transport is important, it is only part of the solution. Our city has to rezoned, redesigned and where appropriate rebuilt so that we don’t need our cars to go about our daily life. This is no small undertaking. It is certainly a lot harder than boring a few kilometres worth of tunnel. However, with the right motivation, it is possible. The hardest part is for us to accept that the investments we have made in the past have been wasteful and stop throwing good money after bad.

Summary: Look at the cause of the problem (the way we are forced to live) rather than the symptom (traffic congestion).