In the lead up to the 2024 Brisbane City Council election on 16 March, we have organised rides, walks, or meetings with 34 candidates across 17 of the city’s 26 wards. You can read more about those interactions here. It’s great to see active transport acknowledged as major issue in this election campaign. More people are realising that importance of transport choices in making our suburbs safe and pleasant places to live. As a recent article in the Brisbane Times points out:

“Even if you love your car, encouraging more people to walk or ride will reduce congestion on Brisbane’s clogged roads for everyone.”

The Greens plan would see Brisbane get moving with protected bike corridors that the bicycle user groups have been asking for for years:

The Greens policy also acknowledges that Brisbane has a vibrant cycling community, with local grassroots groups pushing to make cycling safe, practical and fun. But the current LNP administration has ignored these calls for protected bike lanes across the city.

We’ve met with or ridden with 11 Greens candidates in the lead-up to this election, and we think it’s really significant that the candidates in some of the seats The Greens are most likely to win are all regular commuting cyclists with on-the-ground experience navigating their suburbs by bike – and in a number of cases riding with their children. Indeed it has been the experience of trying to get around Brisbane without a car that has motivated some of these impressive women to get into community organising and then politics in the first place. We’d like to particularly acknowledge Wendy Agham for Central Ward, Seal Chong Wah for Paddington, Kath Angus for Coorparoo, and current Councillor for The Gabba, Trina Massey. And of course, Lord Mayoral candidate Johnathan Sriranganathan has a long history of standing with us on bike advocacy, and organising events and protests himself.

Labor

Meanwhile, Tracey Price and Brisbane Labor have promised additional money to fix footpaths and build new ones, and plant more street trees. They have also committed to completing the CBD cycling grid and restoring funding to the Northern Brisbane Bikeway, as well as establishing a suburban congestion taskforce to take a more strategic approach to improving transport across the city – including the top priority missing connections identified by bicycle user groups.

Labor’s Brisbane Mobility Plan can be found on their policy page, and lists:

• Additional $25 million investment per year to fix 2,000 broken footpaths and construct an additional 50km of footpath annually.
• Fast-tracking walkable neighbourhood projects with new footpaths, ramps and safe crossings.
• Implement school safety travel projects.
• Immediately establish an active and accessible transport stakeholder advisory group to understand the issues across the city.
• Bring forward cycling projects to fix missing links so all road users can be safer.
• Create safer streets in the suburbs and the CBD.
• Expand the auditing of footpath assets to include hazard and deterioration identification.
• Plant more street trees for added shade.
• Increase bus stop connectivity and accessibility.
• Restore funding for vital active transport infrastructure projects that have been cut by the LNP.
• Complete the CBD Cycling Grid through consultation with CBD businesses and the cycling community, relieving pressure on our roads during peak hour.
• Come down hard on e-scooter companies to ensure safety for pedestrians, road users and e-scooter users.

Labor also talk a lot about “suburban intersection upgrades and congestion busting projects”. That had us worried, since “congestion busting” and “intersection upgrades” have too often been code for adding more lanes, or trying to maximize the number of cars through an intersection at the expense of pedestrian/cycle crossings. However it has been reassuring to hear Tracey Price repeat to us and on record in the media that widening roads does not solve congestion.

Chris is quoted in this Guardian article about the election campaign:

“It’s the first time I’ve actually heard a Labor lord mayor candidate say we can’t solve congestion by throwing more roads at it.

“So it’s almost like the first time that one of the major parties sort of clicked, that maybe the status quo isn’t the way to go.”

Space for Cycling spokesperson Chris Cox.

It is heartening to see Labor’s “Roads and congestion” policy explicitly state that their priority for road infrastructure investment will be:

• Traffic calming
• Safe School projects
• More Slow for Sam signs
• Intersection upgrades
• Safe cycling as part of road upgrades
• Public transport as a priority

Finally, we should acknowledge that Labor’s Lord Mayoral candidate Tracey Price has been very generous with her time: riding with both CBD BUG and Brisbane North BUG, and meeting with other BUG representatives during the hectic election campaign. Labor candidates have also been very engaged, with 13 of our 33 meetings being with Labor candidates. In particular, we’d like to acknowledge the impressive Leili Golafshani (Labor candidate for Jamboree), Runcorn candidate John Prescott, Taylar Wojtasik – the Enoggera Candidate who has taken up North BUG’s campaign for safer conditions on Kedron Brook Road, and current Councillor for Morningside, Lucy Collier and her young assistant Maisy for walking with us in a very practical demonstration of how badly our streets perform for people who are young (or old), physically limited, or who can’t drive for any reason.

LNP

Current Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner and the LNP have not announced a policy for active transport this election. However they are running on an overall platform to “Keep Brisbane Moving”, including:

“We’re committed to the critical road and public transport projects Brisbane needs, like supporting a new northside tunnel and an expanded Brisbane Metro.”

LNP’s “Team Schrinner” website

Frustratingly, they don’t seem to have grasped something the other parties have: building more roads does not improve congestion! (In fact, in the long term it makes things worse, and condemns future rate-payers to ever-ballooning maintenance costs for these expensive assets.)

Team Schrinner have announced a Safer Schools Precincts plan to encourage active travel for “growing school precincts”. However that appears to be limited to specific areas of 4 suburbs, covering just 12 schools. How long will hundreds of thousands of other Brisbane families have to wait before they might see plans for safe routes to school? If Council continues to prioritise to the convenience of private car travel, how effective will a few additional crossing points and upgraded footpaths in these new “safer school precincts” really be?

In the absence of an explicit transport policy, and as the party in power in City Hall for most of the last 2 decades, we think it’s fair to judge the LNP’s “Team Schrinner” on their track record – particularly under current Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner who took over from Graham Quirk in 2019 promising 5 new green bridges.

Although the LNP talk a lot about how much they spend on active transport projects like green bridges and riverwalks, over their last 4-year term, the current administration have actually delivered very little in terms of kilometers of connected, protected and usable cycling routes. Their policies going in to this election hint at more of the same.

We don’t want to under-play the significance of the major projects delivered under the Schrinner administration:

• The Indooroopilly Riverwalk (delivered with the help of Federal Government funding in 2021) has been a fantastic upgrade from a steep and treacherous cycling or walking route through the Indooroopilly Station precinct and along Radnor St.
• The newly opened Breakfast Creek Green Bridge (2024) and connection through to Newstead Tce is a major safety upgrade on the sloping shared footpath that previously connected the Lores Bonney Riverwalk to Newstead.
• When it’s open later this year, the CBD to Kangaroo Point green bridge and connecting underpass at Main St will be a huge boon to residents of the inner eastern suburbs – which have the highest residential density in Australia outside Sydney and Melbourne, but shockingly high reliance on private cars for transport.
• The first stage of the CityLink Cycleway – along Elizabeth St, a block of William St, and the lower half of Edward St – has been a great success for people travelling by bike and scooter, as well as giving more space back to pedestrians on the footpaths.
• Although only open briefly before permanent works on the Victoria Bridge as part of the Brisbane Metro project, the temporary separated cycleway across Victoria Bridge demonstrated just how useful this link will be once it is completed permanently and re-opened.

But those expensive flagship projects are not delivering the real potential for widespread adoption of cycling and scooting as practical every-day travel modes – especially for the short trips under 3km which account for the majority of movements in Brisbane, but which are still mainly undertaken by private car.

We have repeatedly asked for key routes around Brisbane to include safe, separated, cycling facilities, and for all intersection upgrades to cater at least equitably for people walking and riding – not just to minimise wait times for people in cars. Council has failed us again and again on issues such as:

• connecting the North Brisbane Bikeway through Eagle Junction
• providing facilities suitable for people of all ages and abilities on Sylvan Rd
• upgrading Vulture St to allow safe travel in and out of the Kurilpa Peninsula
• providing any type of arterial cycling route from the CBD and South Bank to the eastern suburbs
• extending the Gabba Bikeway east even as far as East Brisbane, and south east along Annerley Rd
• prioritising safety on Nudgee Road – and at the very least, not removing the white bike memorial!
• completing the CBD Grid, and extending it into The Valley
• upgrading intersections around the Royal Brisbane Hospital – including where Carolyn Lister was killed

Our disappointment in the current LNP administration should not come as a surprise; we have petitioned, lobbied, and met with the current Council on countless occasions, including thousands of hours of volunteer time on submissions and public advocacy.

We’ve seen how much progress has been achieved in a very short time in cities like Paris and London. The missing ingredient in Brisbane is leadership!

We do appreciate the LNP Councillors and candidates who have met with us during this Council campaign, with special mention to the constructive conversations we have had with Cr Sarah Hutton (Jamboree Ward), Cr Fiona Cunningham (Coorparoo), and Cr Adam Allan (Northgate).

Conclusion

When you go to vote on Saturday 16 March, we encourage you to vote for candidates with a vision and a plan for Brisbane that will make our streets and suburbs healthier, safer, calmer and more pleasant. It is not compulsory to number all the squares, but doing so will help ensure that your vote still counts towards the final result in your local area and for Lord Mayor.