Busted bus routes
If it seems that you have been waiting longer for the bus in the last 12 months, it may be because Translink has revealed that 8,000 bus routes in Brisbane were cancelled in the year to February.
The City Glider Route 60 service from the Teneriffe Ferry Terminal to West End suffered 345 cancellations, being beaten out of first place by the 100 bus route from Queen St to Forest Lake with 487 cancellations.
Translink said more than 99 per cent of services ran as scheduled but the bus drivers’ union said its numbers could not be trusted as “part cancellations’’ where a bus driver completed only a section of a route were not counted with traffic congestion and driver shortages affecting service levels.
Build-up in Newstead
Someone mention congestion? A quick count of developments approved or mooted for the Newstead area shows that over the next five or more years, some 6000 apartments will be built within a kilometre radius of the Gasworks.
That shredding sound you can hear in the background is the noise made when your local Neighbourhood Plan, the one designed to provide a balance between development and quality of life, is ripped into small pieces by the council and thrown out the window.
Congratulations Jarrett
Congratulations to Madonna Jarrett on her election as the Labor Party’s federal member for Brisbane, defeating Liberal candidate Trevor Evans who received 2,344 more primary votes than Ms Jarrett – 37,951 as against 35,607 – but was defeated after the distribution of preferences.
In a broader context, your average simple soul could be forgiven for wondering how a party can claim to have won a landslide victory with a sweeping mandate to govern when two out of every three Australians over the age of 18 didn’t vote for it as a first preference.
Fig not yet fixed
Teneriffe has a new tourist attraction – the massive stump which is all that remains of the tree that fell victim to Cyclone Alfred back in March.
It has been sitting on the roadside now for three months and is now proving popular with visitors who are clambering onto the trunk and posing for a Teneriffe Selfie.
What could possibly go wrong? I await the first law suit that will follow when somebody missteps and breaks an arm.
Liveability #23
While we might modestly claim to be living in Brisbane’s best neighbourhood, we have been officially declared by the Oxford Economics Global Cities Index to live in the 23rd most liveable city in the world.
The index, which assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the world’s 1,000 largest cities, also saw Melbourne ranked sixth ahead of Sydney which climbed from 16th last year to seventh while the Gold Coast moved up from 81st to 69th.
Olympic grandstanding
If speeches and press releases could build stadia then the venues for the Olympics would have been completed months ago.
While details as to just what chunks of Victoria Park will be resumed remain shrouded in secrecy, we have been treated to an announcement – yes, another one – by Olympic Brisbane 2032 President Andrew Liveris revealing plans for a public online survey that he said would guide Games planning at every level over the next seven years.
“We want to make sure every Australian has their say,” he said while Brisbane 2032 co-ordination commission chair Mikaela Cojuangco-Jaworski said it was “always about the people”.
Feeling included and valued? The reality is that if they had bothered to have an online survey asking “the people” of Brisbane if they wanted the Games before the city applied to host them, the answer would have been a resounding “no.”
