Toowoomba council votes to continues transition of filtered right turns at city intersections

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Toowoomba will continue to slowly phase out filtered right turns, following a fierce debate within the council over the practice that has cost the community $74m over the past five years.

Councillors voted at Tuesday’s committee meeting to continue removing filtered right turns at its 62 council-controlled intersections across the region, despite opposition from three elected officials.

Filtered right turns involve a motorist turning right at an intersection by picking a gap in the traffic, rather than having to wait for a specific directional light.

The report, delivered by infrastructure general manager Mike Brady, was devised at the request of some councillors in October last year, who wanted to see the TRC revert back to allowing filtered right turns at all intersections.

However, the report revealed not only did right turn crashes make up nearly a third of all collisions on council intersections between 2017 and 2022 (38 in total), but they were responsible for 21 casualties and cost the community nearly $10m in damage.

Expanded to include both council and state-controlled roads during the same period, there 191 right-turn crashes at intersections in Toowoomba that cost $74m in damage.

Most recently, a woman died on the corner of James and Hume Streets in December due to a right-hand turn.

Currently nearly half of all council intersections have some form of filter control in place, but 32 still don’t and right-turn crashes at those locations over the past five years make up nearly two thirds of all incidents.

But councillor Nancy Sommerfield opposed the move away from filtered right turns, arguing controlled intersections increased congestion and was bad for the environment.

Toowoomba councillors Nancy Sommerfield and Melissa Taylor, who both voted against the motion.

“I liken the removal of filtered turnings to putting plugs on power points to stop children sticking something in them — you educate the child not to put a plug in,” she said.

“Residents are constantly being over regulated through creep and I worry about the data being used, in particular that (officers say) it’s been shown to reduce crashes – how do we know that?

“So many times, I have sat with a red intersection turn signal and not another vehicle in sight.

“This isn’t just one car sitting at lights, but thousands sitting at lights across the state.”

Colleague councillor Tim McMahon agreed with Ms Sommerfield, saying the council was trying to address the wrong end of the problem.

“What we’re trying to do is run around with the band-aids and trying to mitigate on that end when we need to be looking at a better approach for driver education training,” he said.

“When we move from trying to stop everyone to do things and taking personal responsibility, we have a much better outcome for all involved in society.”

In response to the query, Mr Brady said reverting all intersections back to filtered turns would cost at least $500,000, while pointing out the move away from the practice was a national standard.

“Council has an opportunity to manage risk for our opportunity, as we do with every asset that we own,” he said.

“Congestion is an issue and we’re trying to work on that, but crash risk for motorists is a huge cost to our community.

“The council request was to reconsider those and change them — we’re (already) putting something in to improve safety and now we’re looking at removing them.”

The intersection of Russell and Victoria Streets in Toowoomba City. The council has voted to continue removing filtered right turns from its crossings across the region, despite some pushback from a number of councillors.

Councillor Kerry Shine said while filtered right turns saved an average of a minute in travel per motorist, he believed removing them was a greater benefit for the community.

“For the sake of a minute, which does seem like five, all you have to dwell on is there have been several deaths in recent weeks (on our roads),” he said.

“Tempting as it is to pander to the impatient in our community, it would be wrong of us to not to agree with the officer’s recommendation.”

Council eventually endorsed the officer’s recommendation to continue the transition, with Ms Sommerfield, Mr McMahon and Melissa Taylor voting against it.