Golden Age: Transport expert Matthew Burke reveals solutions to Gold Coast’s traffic issues

A LEADING traffic expert has revealed what needs to be done to solve the Gold Coast’s traffic issues and take pressure off the M1. And some of them involve saying goodbye to your car.

AS we look to the problems on the northern end of the M1, we cannot build our way out of the problem. What we have to do is shift more people on to the trains to Brisbane.

This means concentrating land use around the railway line and creating work in places like Beenleigh. It will build up employment in these centres.

Concentrating more activity around the train stations such as Helensvale, Coomera, Nerang, Varsity Lakes and Robina. This creates less reason for people to be on the highway and allow a greater share of travel to occur on the train rather than the road.

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Matthew Burke with the M1

Creating more government jobs on the Gold Coast would get people off the road so they do not have to go to Brisbane every day.

If you look at places like Denmark they are careful about where they put jobs. Copenhagen, which is famous for its city planning as well as Stockholm, have used carefully located suburban employment centres which are right near the railways stations.

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Traffic on the M1 (AAP image, John Gass)

On the M1 you only have to look at it and see what a busway next to the highway can do and we need to extend the busway further south from Brisbane.

The notion of just going to six lanes in each direction through Springwood is crazy — the busway must be extended further south and would function to get more people off the road.

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Griffith University Associate Professor Matthew Burke (AAP Image/Claudia Baxter)

A lot of bad planning was done 20 years ago and these days suburbs like Ormeau struggle to work well because you have to travel to get on to the motorway.

There are few other ways to get out of that suburb.

Doing nothing but continually widening the motorway will only add more cars to our roads through a function we call induced traffic.

Widening the motorway further would put 1500 people extra per hour on the roads whereas that number of people could be carried by two trains.

This is a cycle which was only broken up north in Brisbane when the busways were built along the motorway.

This cycle must be broken. This is vital.

The Gold Coast also has to have light and heavy rails travelling to the Gold Coast Airport by 2030.

As for the second M1, it was last year clearly pitched as a vote winner and it fell flat.

We have had arguments for years over freeway proposals through that area just to create a parallel route and it does not make a lot of sense.