Dan Petrie: Brisbane needs more traffic bridges to connect city

Brisbane is a city hopelessly congested and desperately needs more traffic bridges to connect the city, writes Dan Petrie. VOTE IN OUR POLL

Brisbane residents, on your marks, get set, wait!!!! We can’t forget about building bridges in this city.

The money for new stadiums is there but when it comes to building bridges that link our city, there have been far too many false starts!

The city of Brisbane needs to be linked.

While taking on the role of unpopular contrarian, I am happy to attack the same motherhood statements about the Olympics around ‘game-changers’ and ‘lasting legacy’ for a city which is now hopelessly congested and with no ring-road for a population approaching three million people.

Queensland’s ‘too hard’ basket is typically occupied by dams, trains and bridges.

If the rains of the last six months have saturated the Queensland fields to the point that they can no longer absorb any water, the same can be said for the cluttered roads of Brisbane.

Dan Petrie says Brisbane needs more bridges to connect the city. Picture: Brendan Radke

The love-in between the Brisbane City Council and State Government around Olympics board appointments seem to have overlooked the need for practically linking the city with car-carrying bridges with the latest artist impression of what could be on the Brisbane River.

The western suburbs are arguably the most unloved part of Brisbane where funding is concerned and the only way for residents to get anyway is travelling either into the city or crossing the crash plagued Centenary Highway.

Getting on the Moggill Ferry was quaint when I was a boy but rather outdated now.

So much of the Olympics infrastructure vision rests on how much money can be spent on placing palm trees on top of skyscrapers.

For the record, legendary Brisbane hairdresser Stefan achieved this feat in the 1980s (what a decade!!)

Some of the ideas now on display on the Brisbane City Council website include a floating Olympic swimming and yet another nauseating suggestion of a phallic-like structure to let the world know we have arrived as a city.

The only thing missing from this collection of ideas that resembles something you would see on a Walt Disney storyboard class was flying cars.

Connecting the city and getting around via bridges is a nagging problem that will not go away anytime soon.

Congestion on the Centenary Highway bridge.

The last substantial report into ‘Bridging Brisbane’ came in 2017 via RACQ whose findings revealed overwhelming support for car bridges for West End to St Lucia through to a Bellbowrie River Hills crossing.

Toowong which could be easily be connected to West End via a bridge would remove much of the frustration of having to travel to the Go-Between bridge for example but instead will be connected by a green bridge which will cost taxpayers millions.

The Centenary Bridge which has earned hall of fame status leads the daily traffic report with clogged traffic with the other nearest crossing being the single-lane, Walter Taylor bridge

Crossing from Bulimba to Teneriffe as well as Hamilton and Balmoral are also in the positive for a report now approaching five years in age.

In highlighting such results, there is the engineering and feasibility that goes with such proposals but clearly the idea of driving extended distances just to get across the Brisbane River from the suburbs should at least make the council minutes or state government cabinet deliberations.

The Olympics committee chair, Andrew Liveris, a one-time chair and CEO of US industrial giant Dow Chemical suggested in an interview with this newspaper earlier in the week that South East Queensland could become a ‘lifestyle superpower.’

If we don’t “bridge” some of the more pressing challenges “crossing” our city there will be not much of a lifestyle to trumpet!