Good news, bad news on roads

Senior Reporter Arthur Gorrie.

News of the almost imminent opening of Gympie’s massive Bruce Highway by-pass (15 years in the making), has been accompanied by bad news about major roads falling apart across the region, as well as calls to act now on the next step.

It has been said that a motorway is an excellent way of taking a traffic problem from one place and delivering it to another – and we hope that will not happen at Curra.

There, the high-speed well serviced traffic on the by-pass will be funnelled back onto the two-lane country road we call a highway on the northside.

Good roads often increase traffic speed and volume, while lulling drivers into a false sense of engineered safety, leading them to be potentially more dangerous when they return to the old fashioned standard which once claimed too many lives to Gympie’s south.