Mass transit isnt a silver bullet either. Here in Brisbane, they standardized around a narrow gauge designed to pull cart loads of timber down mountains. They duplicate it where they can, but effectively its a city of technical debt. Theres a maximum size of train we are already at, and a maximum number of trains per minute we can sustain.
So we have a decent mass transit system but its not far from peak capacity, and most of what the government has been doing is hacking around that. Trammish busses, cross river rail etc.
So we need to attack the issue from the other side too. We have a weirdly non dense central region, largely due to single issue anti development voters, who dont want apartment buildings right where they should be (on top of mass transit hubs). Instead the inner suburbs are littered with 1950s character homes, battleaxed once for massive profit.
We can take significant load off of a system close to a decade from collapse by simply removing outdated zoning.
And the way the council here operates, utilities and road upgrades necessitated by development are borne by the property developer. So there's really near zero cost in approaching things this way. And they have also used priority approvals, where if a certain amount of floor space of a development is earmarked for light commercial, they can cut a few years off approval time. So theres absolutely no reason not to, as the big residential buildings grow, they grow their own services and utilities.
So we have a decent mass transit system but its not far from peak capacity, and most of what the government has been doing is hacking around that. Trammish busses, cross river rail etc.
So we need to attack the issue from the other side too. We have a weirdly non dense central region, largely due to single issue anti development voters, who dont want apartment buildings right where they should be (on top of mass transit hubs). Instead the inner suburbs are littered with 1950s character homes, battleaxed once for massive profit.
We can take significant load off of a system close to a decade from collapse by simply removing outdated zoning.
And the way the council here operates, utilities and road upgrades necessitated by development are borne by the property developer. So there's really near zero cost in approaching things this way. And they have also used priority approvals, where if a certain amount of floor space of a development is earmarked for light commercial, they can cut a few years off approval time. So theres absolutely no reason not to, as the big residential buildings grow, they grow their own services and utilities.