40 km/hr in CBD streets
Brisbane City Council have commissioned a survey into attitudes towards a 40 km/hr speed limit in the Brisbane CBD. You should all go and fill it out.
Introducing such a speed limit to our CBD streets would go some way towards making our city a place for people rather than a place for cars. There are a number of dangerous spots in the CBD where people continue to jaywalk despite the BCC’s miserable ad campaign and the Qld Police ticketing jaywalkers. When (relatively) high speed limits and pedestrians mix, an accident is inevitable. A midblock crossing on Elizabeth St between Albert and Edward Sts has gone some way to making sure school students don’t get hit in that area again but Councillor Graham Quirk has made it clear in the past that he believes pedestrians have no place on our streets.
An intersection on Eagle St has had 19 accidents since 2002 and there are calls to change the placement of traffic lights around the intersection to reduce the number of accidents. I’d welcome any proposal to make the CBD streets safer for pedestrians and I don’t think we should stop at moving traffic lights and bringing down speed limits. I think we need to start looking at things like intersection redesign to stop dangerous turns being made and things like a congestion charge to remove unnecessary cars from the CBD.
When the NSBT opens, we will have an amazing opportunity to reconsider what the rules are for cars on city streets. I know that public transport in Brisbane at the moment isn’t at world class standards, thanks to the removal of bus lanes on arterial roads by Council and the woeful lack of investment in rail infrastructure by the State government. The Federal government, too, are to blame for our car-centric transport system thanks to projects like AusLink which provide billions of dollars for road projects but absolutely nothing for public transport. With the price of petrol still quite high, global warming and the need to rein in urban sprawl ever present, we need to start planning Brisbane (and other cities) around facilitating the movement of people rather than the movement of cars.
In addition to speed limits, reconfiguring intersections and removing cars from the CBD streets, I’d also like to see the Riverside Expressway torn down once the NSBT is opened and the land underneath it used to develop Brisbane’s bike, pedestrian and ferry network. The Bicentennial bikeway can be widened and a rail put up to prevent people falling in to the mangroves, the QUT car park can be replaced with a QUT grass and tree park and the ferry stops can be made much more inviting, encouraging their use. We may be able to leave the Captain Cook Bridge intact, provided we can take a lane or two and convert them to protected bicycle facilities to link the Bicentennial Bikeway to the South East Freeway Bikeway. This would help pedestrians on the Goodwill Bridge by getting a number of lycra-clad cyclists off it and on to a reconfigured Captain Cook Bridge.
Our city is a lovely place, it’s a shame that cars can’t appreciate the beauty as much as people can.
