I read the headlines on Brisbane Times. If I’m on desktop I can read the articles via private browser. Otherwise ABC. The Guardian has a QLD section but it’s not usually breaking news.
She sees the merit in accelerated housing construction, but doubts how affordable those properties will be.
It’s a mad rush to build houses to attend to the housing crisis but then if no one can afford them, who is it helping in the crisis?
I worked a site next to a motorway recently, backing up to mangroves and a river, in the middle of a cleared Melaleuca swamp and I thought “this isn’t great, it must be cheap”. 400 to 600m2, house and land was $1.2 million. I remembered I took a photo.
The problem is that none of our levels of government actually want housing prices to fall. They’ll talk a big game about how they want people to be able to afford a home, but then turn around and reinforce to existing homeowners and property investors that they wouldn’t dare do anything to actually harm their investments.
I'm genuinely done with Reddit. If they got a new CEO, new higher ups and what not then maybe I'd go back but I wouldn't go back until I saw proof it had changed.
We’re well past the point where it’s a known fact that putting in bike lanes, even if you remove parking to do it, is incredibly beneficial for local businesses. Unfortunately business owners tend not to be that smart about matters outside the day-to-day running of their own business, and so they buy into fearmongering about the idea that removing parking will kill their business.
The average business has a street frontage of like 2 car parks, and when studies have been done it’s very common for those parks to be taken up for hours at a time. If your business relied on people driving to it (and isn’t in a large shopping centre with a massive parking garage), it would be completely non-viable and go out of business by the end of the month.
The latest episode of The Urbanist Agenda podcast, entitled “Some Business Owners REALLY Hate Bike Lanes (with Bike Curious)” (available on Nebula now, to the public from tomorrow or Saturday, not sure how the time zones work out—show notes, including sources, available already on Nebula without signing in), has some great discussion about this. They have some interesting theorising that part of the issue is that owners tend not to actually live near the store, while customers do. So owners are driving in to their business, and because their day-to-day experience relies on driving, the assume that must be how it is for everyone.
When the new bike lanes went in in the CBD, business owners on the affected streets estimated 43% of their customers came to them by car. In fact only 19% did. Boundary Street in West End would be another great site for this kind of infrastructure.
The article’s discussion of voting systems and their flaws is what makes this article excellent and worth reading.
Optional preferential voting is hugely flawed. The final four paragraphs especially:
The LNP is not overwhelmingly popular – the LNP hasn’t won a majority of the vote at either the 2020 or 2024 elections, but look set to win a significant majority in addition to the mayoralty. There is no single centre-left party that can rival them in popularity, but Labor and the Greens did poll a majority of the council vote between them.
It is true that the result would probably do a better job of reflecting how people voted under CPV than OPV, but I don’t think that should be the end of the story. Any single-member electorate system will do a very poor job of representing a community that is voting the way we saw in Brisbane last night.
It doesn’t have to be that way. New South Wales, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and to a lesser extent South Australia and regional Victoria have proportional electoral systems that do a better job of representing voters. Even three-member wards would produce much better results and make the question of whether voters are forced to mark preferences much less important.
The Queensland government has now been in power for nine years and has totally failed to tackle the poor state of Queensland local government electoral systems. The block vote system used for undivided councils is an embarrassment, and the single-member wards used in the south east aren’t much better. Queenslanders should demand better.
And to make things even worse, the LNP has indicated it intends to move to optional preferential voting in state elections as well, if they win the state election in October.
the LNP has indicated it intends to move to optional preferential voting in state elections as well, if they win the state election in October.
“But wait… we can make it worse!” - LNP
If they do not get voted in this October, we still have every future election for years to come to worry about this happening if they manage to win.
On a side note, I didn’t even realise that the local government election was optional preferential voting. I even numbered all the boxes because that has been ingrained in me since I started voting. Learn something new everyday.
@PetulantBandicoot@Zagorath I planned my preferences before going to vote, and the ECQ person told me to “just vote 1” on both Mayor and Ward.
I was so flabbergasted I didn’t correct them and now wonder how many people didn’t know they had an option (even though both options are on the ballots).
I put my preferences in despite being in a seat very safely in the hands of the ones I didn’t vote for.
Honestly this is part of why I think it’s so important not to have OPV. Consistency is good, and the only way the state can be consistent is with CPV, because the state can’t change how general elections are done.
I admittedly didn’t read the article, but that’s faster than I expected from the headline. The title makes it seem like he was at a crawl, but now I’m like, which joggers were running faster than 16MPH?
Yeah. This basically sounds like you're supposed to dismount and walk across the bridge. The pictures in the article show a walkway shared between pedestrians and cyclists going in both directions. It doesn't look wide enough to be doing 26km/h if there are pedestrians and cyclists about going in both directions.
26 kph or 16 mph is not a difficult speed to hit on a bike, especially if you are in good shape. I am not in particularly good shape and I cruise even on my mountain bike around that speed. If the path is crowded and I’m dodging people, sure I’d slow down considerably, but who’s to say they didn’t clock him when he had some free air between groups of pedestrians.
A motion brought off the table by the LNP which was first brought by former Councillor Sriranganathan. It was to look at putting bike lanes on Vulture Street and Montague Road, noting that this might require removing on-street parking.
Cr Johnston is absolutely outraged that this motion is being brought off the table by the LNP without Cr Massey, the successor to Cr Sriranganathan and the local Councillor to the relevant area, being given any notice.
Cr Massey is angry that the LNP is voting this motion down, saying that they are using the weak excuse that the State Government is doing a project on Montague Rd (but not anywhere on Vulture St) which might include stuff like this. She points out that this is meant to be a very high-density area, with a population growing enormously thanks to the LNP’s proposed upzoning, and that these are busy roads where improved infrastructure is important to a “clean, green, and sustainable Brisbane”.
Cr Adams rejects this, and says the project “is now null and void”, because they have already budgeted for a study into connectivity in the area. She says that Vulture Street isn’t part of the Montague Rd study, and therefore it might be part of some future study, and therefore the original motion is null and void. This claim makes no sense. To simultaneously call a motion about bike lanes on Vulture St and Montague Rd “null and void” because there’s money for a study into bike lanes on one of those roads is a pretty blatant mistruth.
Just watched this and … just wow. I’m left equal parts confused and enraged about it all. Cr Johnston’s rant was epic and Cr Massey did pretty well considering she was blindsided by it.
Yeah Cr Adams comments were so especially enraging because it twigged that fascist detecting muscle we’ve all developed over the last 7 or so years. The blatant lies upon lies. Lying so blatantly while admitting the lie and just kinda…pretending there is no lie? It makes me so mad.
Obviously she’s not done nearly enough fascist stuff to actually label her as a fascist. But gods above she’s taken a page out of the fascist playbook today, and embraced that one page wholeheartedly.
I’m astonished that this development is not going ahead. It’s been in planning for a very long time, but they only actually demolished the former Woolies on the planned site earlier this year.
The area’s State MP had these thoughts on Facebook. Included is a suggestion that the State Government should buy the land and use it to build public housing and a park. He also says:
This whole development has seemed dodgy from the moment Council approved it - they gave the developer major concessions (like removing any requirement for the initially suggested “urban common” greenspace) and we later discovered the developer’s company had donated to the LNP using a loophole in state donation laws.
I think its cancellation is kinda a shame. Yes, if the state government does take Michael Berman’s requests on board then that will be an even better outcome. But this was going to be a large amount of housing delivered to an area that really needs it, and in a way that would have felt pretty integrated into the streetscape.
This hospital almost killed my mum. Botched surgery. Sent home with a hole in her intestine. Massive infection. In a coma for a month. Never been the same since.
🤷♂️ we’re not super strict about it. The goal is to get people out taking photos with intent more often, but it’s also just to share how lovely our city is.
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