The thing with tunnelling the Riverside Expressway is that you wouldn’t just be putting it in a tunnel, you would be building substantial access ramp tunnels on Alice St, Margaret St, Elizabeth St, Ann St, Turbot St, maybe Herschel St, maybe Makerston St, probably Hale Street and wherever the main tunnel will surface to reconnect to Coro Drive.
It would be an eye bogglingly expensive project that would likely result in a total reworking of the CBD road network dependant on how far from the river these access tunnels would need to pop up, and would be massively disruptive during construction. I can’t see it ever happening, even after the REX reaches end of life.
My view of a replacement tunnel is that it wouldn’t access the city at all - it would be a bypass tunnel that would connect the South East Freeway to Coronation Drive and Hale Street.
The city could still be accessed via the Captain Cook Bridge at Alice/Margaret Streets, but the Riverside Expressway past that would be torn down.
Dumping the entirety of the city’s traffic solely onto Alice & Margaret Streets means that all the traffic to/from Elizabeth Street, Ann Street and Turbot Street is now being funneled through the middle of the CBD along George and Edward Streets. That includes all general traffic to/from CBD and Valley destinations, delivery trucks, service vehicles and all the buses that use the Captain Cook Bridge.
Considering the amount of traffic that you get on Elizabeth, Ann and Turbot Streets at the best of times (a lot of which comes off of or flows onto the REX directly), funneling all that down George and Edward would turn them into absolute carparks, especially during the morning and afternoon peak (I’ve seen this happen when there’s been badly placed accidents blocking those inner city arterials). It would be bedlum.
Your plan is treating the REX as a city bypass, where what it was designed to do is filter the CBD and Valley traffic across the CBD’s road network, specifically to prevent it from turning any one road into a congested bottleneck.
The whole intent is to massively reduce the number of cars driving into the city. It is completely absurd to have those streams of cars pouring into the city at 8:30.
Removing a key road network alone will not achieve that end.
I don’t think it will ever be possible for CBD traffic to be reduced enough to be able to do without those direct access ramps and an arterial structure like the Expressway. Even without private vehicles, between couriers/deliveries, servicing vehicles and buses, that would still be too much traffic to funnel directly across the CBD.
It would absolutely be enough to handle courier drivers and buses. Freeways and freeway ramps like those at Elizabeth Street and Turbot Street are designed with the intention of a city relying on private cars. There are much much larger cities than Brisbane that do without them entirely. It is American-led car brain that makes us think we need them.
I agree that it’s not going to happen for the same reason that we couldn’t get proper bus lanes on Gympie Road - our entire political culture is obsessed by the idea that losing a single lane of car traffic will crash the city, despite it having the opposite effect wherever it’s been tried.
The freeway will not be “end of life” - structures like this essentially last forever if they’re properly maintained. I doubt we will see any substantial change in any of our lifetimes.
But this is not what it is currently doing. So much traffic on the REX is throughput, same with the Story Bridge, a lot of people avoiding tolling. A big proportion CBD patronage is rail and bus, we know this from studies done by BCC regarding its CBD bike lane surveys. It was businesses and trades that assumed most people getting to the CBD were travelling by car or ride-share and overestimated these modes and greatly under-estimated PT and active transport.
Furthermore, we’ve seen people change modal types when the expressway was previously closed for repairs. It also didn’t result in huge issues with service vehicles and deliveries. A like for like replacement of the REX would be a huge cost if you’re not investing in PT and Active Transport and hard to justify given how many more cities are moving away from these projects or at least changing how they’re built (shared green spines).
If the Clem7 wasn’t a tollway people from the northside wouldn’t need to use the Story Bridge or the CBD to go southside.
If the BCC closed the Story Bridge someday for major repairs. Will people
A) not drive to Fortitude Valley/Kangaroo Point?
B) drive through the CBD?
C) use the Clem7 if the toll $$$ was temporarily discounted.
If there was an underground REX tunnel proposed tomorrow, would the project have better value for money than the Gympie Rd Bypass Tunnel, if it included knocking down the REX and keeping the Captain Cook bridge?
At the very least I would really like to see one lane per side of the REX to be cordoned off and be turned into a sort of busway extension between the Woolloongabba junction and the exits at Margaret/Alice St, allowing for a full-on corridor for the Riverside buses and peak expresses.
It wouldn’t be too hard to do it on the inbound, with the outbound needing some sort of dive-under at the Vulture St exit, which under the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t be too difficult.
Luckily it wouldn’t be “alone” - since the entire PT system is (to a fault!) geared towards giving people alternatives to driving for this one, extremely specific journey, i.e. commuting from the suburbs to the CBD and back in peak hour. Luckily it’s also decades away, by which time even more investment will have been sunk into PT.
As others have said, it’s worth keeping in mind what happens when the REX does actually close, which most people here will remember well. The answer is – life continued as normal!
My recollection is a bit different. I recall significant gridlock throughout the CBD, major arterials being reduced to a crawl, reports of 15 minute local trips taking almost an hour, and public pleas from government to business owners to stagger start times of employees. Reports at the time stated that that inner-city retailers were estimated to have lost more than $3 million a day and the business community up to $6 million a day during the original 2006 closure.
It’s worth also remembering that, IIRC, this wasn’t an entire closure of the Expressway - northbound traffic could still exit via Margaret Street and Elizabeth Street (traffic was forced off at Elizabeth Street), and southbound traffic could still use Alice Street to access the Captain Cook Bridge.
Even seattle tore down it’s equivilant of the riverside express and replaced it with a tunnel. Now that whole area is lovely to walk around in. Seattle despite going in the right direction when it comes to public transit is still very much a car centric city.
If they can do it, we can do it. Also the majority of people using the riverside expressway are not going into the cbd. They are simply using it to cross the river.