Queensland Government promises to build yet another (probably tolled) fucking car tunnel. @brisbane
Fuck this makes me **so** angry. We KNOW this doesn’t work. You want to solve congestion, road diet the existing roads. Build good bike infrastructure. Build good public transport. How does this happen with a single off-the-cuff announcement when *months* of back-and-forth debate over public transport network with the NWTC went *nowhere*.
@brisbane this announcement comes right in the middle of widening Gympie into an 8-lane monstrosity through this section. It needs a *serious* road diet. One 24/7 bus lane in each direction, a bike lane in each direction, and it would *still* be a 4 lane major road. But instead, we get peak-hour-only bus lanes and you can navigate some winding back streets (give way every time you cross *any* road!) if you wanna cycle to Chermside.
I like you the term you use, ‘road diet’.
Is this something you’ve made up, or seen somewhere? In other words could you expand on the idea behind the term a bit more?
Nah that’s a fairly common term. They probably picked it up on Not Just Bikes or one of the other urbanist YouTube channels. You’ll often see it discussed along with “traffic evaporation”, which is the inverse of induced demand. Talk about removing lanes and people will say “but it’ll get so congested, where will all the traffic go‽” The answer is: it disappears. It evaporates. Some people choose not to travel at all. Others move their schedule to other times. Some decide to now take public or active transport.
Road diets are often included alongside wider footpaths or to add cycle paths. And yeah, I think Gympie Rd would be a perfect candidate for receiving a road diet. Interestingly, the Qld Govt does seem to have suggested (see the concept plan below) they plan to give Gympie that needed diet…after they build the tunnel. Apparently they made similar claims about Lutwyche Rd when the older tunnel was put in, and it’s still a gross stroad* today. It’s also, notably, still highly congested. So I don’t have any faith that they’ll actually stick to that plan.
Happy cake day, by the way! I expect there’ll be quite a few of those coming over the next month…
* a stroad, if you’re not already aware, is an unholy mix of a street and a road. A street’s primary function is to be a destination. It’s where people live, and it’s where shops, cafes, etc. that people want to go to are located. They should be low speed and comfortable places to be, because of this. Roads are for moving around the city. They should be comparatively fast and high volume, and to accommodate this a good road will have few exits or entrances and be uncomplicated.
A stroad tries to do both of these things, and ends up being terrible at both. They’re complicated with a lot of side streets and driveways for destinations, but they’re also wide and high speed, resulting in it being an inhospitable environment to be in and unsafe for pedestrians & cyclists. You get more congestion and crashes on stroads than either roads or streets, because these tend to be caused by people doing something unexpected, like changing lanes, braking, or entering the road in a small gap in traffic.
Gympie Rd provides good examples of both. Most parts you probably think of are really awful stroads. Stafford Rd until Chermside shops, and Aspley Tavern north until the Red Rooster/Outback are two stretches where it’s a stroad, and probably the worst example of a stroad in Brisbane. But between Chermside Shopping Centre and the Aspley Tavern it’s actually not terrible road design. A few driveways, especially on the northbound side, but overall pretty smooth driving.
Nundah is a success story for that kind of plan, the tunnel there transformed the main street.
Yeah Nundah is much better than most places we have. It’s still a bit too car centric though, and the improvement only seems to be Sandgate Rd between Buckland Rd and Wood St. Buckland Rd itself is a major cross route within the suburb and is still very stroady (a residential stroad rather than the commercial stroad that Gympie Lutwyche, and most of Sandgate Rds are). And no improvement to the terrible Nudgee Rd in the east of the suburb.
But even those parts that were upgraded did a B+ job of improving for pedestrians, but more like a D+ for cyclists. So it’s far from ideal. It’s a success because things are way better than before, but it’s only a middling success compared to what’s been done overseas.
Haha, cheers on the cake day, i’d forgotten!
Thanks for the description of some of the terms. Stroad, that i’ve heard before, is good to read a little reminder on. I reckon parts of Orrong, and Canning roads in WA would be good candidates ecamples of Stroads.
I’ve never been to WA, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Most of the roads we design in Australia, apart from motorways and inter-city highways, are stroads.
Yeah very true. I suppose those examples were just two fairly extreme examples.