Brisbane: Car City in chaos.
October 19th 2006 09:07
Sad Roads
There are large parts of this largest city in Australia (not population) where you cannot live unless you have a car. There are schools that have no public transport to service them and that are reached by roads that no bicycle can traverse. There are suburbs where old people die alone, undetected for days near highways choked with traffic where no recreational walkways or bikeways exist. These are the nightmares portrayed in Leunig cartoons. This is smog city where the pollutant nitric gases become trapped between Mt. Cootha and Ipswich and fall like a heavy, toxic shroud into the hot afternoon. It is not Mexico City and not Bangkok but comes fast to resemble them. In Kenmore you must rise at 6.00 AM to make it into the city on time. Like Bangkok, in five years, to face this same journey you will need to rise at 4.30AM.
Future and now
Today that city has been brought to a grinding halt by a small centimeter crack in a lane of the Captain Cook Bridge, a part where the highway meets the city. This one crack has all but shut the city down of an afternoon and in the morning. There is not much day in between. The cost to business and Government is in the millions. The amazing spin doctor response has been that the crack did not exist before last week end. It only just appeared. With this one crack the whole, hopeless, unplanned and chaotic result has undone the place so completely that the watching terrorist has now learned where he needs to place his bomb if he wants to bring Brisbane to a standstill. So poor is the planning and so inadequate the response that it appears as though the Government in Brisbane has only just realized that there is a highway sticking straight out of the city. In fact there are no contingency plans. The highway has just been shut. Make your way around it as you will. Too bad.
Sunny Queensland
Blind Omar could work out looking at the place what would happen if the highway was closed. And the highway has been there for many years. Public transport is next to hopeless with no new rail stations and connections opening as long as there has been a highway.
No good voting anyone out of office. The state Government has just been re-elected.
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