Airport link trucks make street ‘unliveable’
Windsor residents have attacked Brisbane City deputy mayor Graham Quirk for refusing to attend a rally to discuss claims the airport link construction traffic has made their street unliveable.
Windsor resident Stephen Pahl appealed to the Brisbane Council meeting last week for action after outlining major noise issues with heavy construction traffic in Victoria Street, Windsor.
Mr Phal said he delivered the speech to council after a petition with 29 signatures from the 43 houses with Victoria St frontage failed to gain the attention of deputy mayor and Infrastructure Committee chair, Graham Quirk.
He said he was disappointed Cr Quirk declined to meet with residents at a rally on Sunday.
“We believe that the council has a duty to us as a council to provide us with a reasonable level of living as a ratepayer of this community. At the moment we are not getting that,” he said.
Mr Pahl said heavy articulated trucks and large cranes used the road to access the airport link construction project which lowered the living standards of local residents.
“At the moment we are getting hammered . . .. When they come down [the hill] they are using exhaust brakes at 3am,” he said.
The Brisbane City Council Roads and Traffic Fact Sheet, www.brisbane.qld.gov.au, defined local access roads to have “limited neighbourhood traffic movement and limited through traffic”.
Signs posted at both ends of Victoria St clearly state the road is for “local access only.”
In spite of that provision another Victoria St resident Tony Hoad provided NewsBytes with a video showing heavy articulated trucks and cranes using Victoria St between Newmarket Rd and Northy St.
He said heavy cranes had used the street as recently as Saturday.
Mr Pahl said Windsor residents were not anti-development and had tolerated construction noise for the past three years with the CLEM7 and now the airport link.
He said in this case heavy vehicle traffic could be diverted via Green Tce and a four-ton vehicle limit put on Victoria St without impacting on access.
Cr Quirk told the council chamber last week the traffic problem was “quite a long running concern” as there had been industrial precincts in the area for a long time.
He said his office would continue to look at the situation in Victoria St and carry out traffic surveys but declined Mr Pahl’s offer to attend the Sunday rally.
Although Cr Quirk could not be contacted directly, a media spokesperson, Kylie Jacobson, said the deputy mayor had not received any “formal” invitations to the event and had prior work commitments on Sunday which prevented him from attending the rally.
As a long term resident of Green Terrace I don’t know why we should be dumped on with city traffic when the eastern end of Newmarket Rd has always been the 4 lane major arterial feeding Lutchwyche Rd. If construction equipment needs to turn using these streets to access the sites (and from my experience a lot does) that’s fine with in reason. To date this hasn’t been a big problem. The council needs to stop supporting rat runs in this city, (of which Green Terrace is up there with the worst) and understand that the majors could flow much better if we didn’t all have to stop at traffic lights every 200 mtrs because of another rat run created by the council who thought it was a good idea at the time. Green Terrace was never designed or constructed to suit large volumes of traffic.
It was disappointing that this meeting was to address and bring about awareness of the short falls of the Lutwyche Rd redevelopment plans but turned into a whinge session about trucks and street parking. If we keep focus of the issues and maybe offer some alternative solutions like narrowing Victoria St to allow for a service road off Lutwyche Rd to the new development, the decision makers might just take some notice.