Ripley is an absolutely no brainer and has been for a decade. Pure idiocy that it hasn’t happened yet.
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If it was Perth it would have happened a decade ago.
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It’s certainly a lot more politically popular to build an urban rail project when 80% of the state’s population lives in the capital city than when only 50% does.
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Yeah, I have noticed there’s always comments that “the government doesn’t care about anybody outside SEQ” when these kinds of projects are announced.
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If you’re only considering Greater Brisbane, sure, but something like 72% of the state’s population lives in SEQ, a fairly large proportion of which (population wise, not area) is served by public transport of some kind.
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Agreed. Since the region is so interconnected and has such a high proportion of the QLD population, I tend to think of public transport as a region wide thing rather than a city thing. That’s why I think different bus services and companies serving different councils and causing issues (looking at you BCC) is so frustrating.
But there does seem to be a perception amongst some in regional areas that SEQ gets everything and they get nothing. Having said that, I read somewhere once (although I can’t remember where I read it) that on a per capita basis regional QLD actually gets a much higher share of funding than SEQ. When I say funding, I’m talking transport in general. Open to being corrected if I’m wrong.
Largely correct, although per capita funding for inner Brisbane is currently very high, largely due to CRR.
This is hardly surprising, though. Imagine the per-capita cost of maintaining the Flinders & Barkly Hwys between Townsville and Mount Isa, and to the NT border. Then there’s the adjacent railway line.
Same for the Warrego between Toowoomba and Charleville, along with the railway line. Then there’s the Landsborough Hwy from Morven to Cloncurry, which probably has even fewer people per km of road. Providing infrastructure to outback Qld is eye-wateringly expensive, per capita.
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Yeah - QLD covers such a large amount of landmass that servicing that remaining 28% of the population is so expensive!
Although with CRR I think there are some who wouldn’t understand that even though it is an inner city project, it will benefit other places too.
I think the reactions of Sunshine Coast and Palm Beach residents to the prospect of light rail shows us exactly how pro-public transport they are. Not all cities are similar in attitude, and both places clearly have very different mentalities from Brisbane.
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This is a very strange way to measure it. The table also shows the Brisbane suburban areas are all at the lowest end for spending per person. It makes no sense to think of Cross River Rail as spending for inner Brisbane City residents when most of the benefits will go to the whole region, including the Gold and Sunshine Coasts.
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I certainly agree, it is strange, but nonetheless this is how it is measured.
Imagine that the freight bottlenecks between Beerburrum and Nambour are removed. This would show as infrastructure spending on the Sunshine Coast, but everywhere north of there would benefit.
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