this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
61 points (86.7% liked)

Australia

3605 readers
64 users here now

A place to discuss Australia and important Australian issues.

Before you post:

If you're posting anything related to:

If you're posting Australian News (not opinion or discussion pieces) post it to Australian News

Rules

This community is run under the rules of aussie.zone. In addition to those rules:

Banner Photo

Congratulations to @Tau@aussie.zone who had the most upvoted submission to our banner photo competition

Recommended and Related Communities

Be sure to check out and subscribe to our related communities on aussie.zone:

Plus other communities for sport and major cities.

https://aussie.zone/communities

Moderation

Since Kbin doesn't show Lemmy Moderators, I'll list them here. Also note that Kbin does not distinguish moderator comments.

Additionally, we have our instance admins: @lodion@aussie.zone and @Nath@aussie.zone

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] abhibeckert@beehaw.org -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm in regional QLD, and this is no where near the biggest problem we have.

For example a major highway (National Route 1, which passes through every major city in Australia) goes through a a mountain range just 20 minutes from the CBD and closes almost once a week for an average of 6.6 hours due to car crashes which are difficult to recover. The detour when the road is closed adds 3 hours to the drive time and worse it's unsafe (and illegal) to perform a U turn anywhere on the entire stretch of road up the mountain so whenever it closes thousands of people get stuck and just have to wait until the road opens (which again, takes hours). Emergency services are forced to drive on the wrong side of the road around hundreds of narrow blind corners to reach the accident, and anyone who does turn around is risks crashing into them.

A multimillion dollar review into wether something should be done about it was delayed repeatedly for years and then finally carried out during a full covid lockdown when we had the highest number of covid cases the city saw in the entire pandemic and businesses were only allowed to open if they were declared an essential service. Nobody could leave their home except to go to those essential services and even then you weren't allowed to travel to other cities or towns except for very rare excuses. Traffic on roads between cities/towns, like the range being assessed, was obviously almost zero and surprise! They determined that traffic was minimal, nothing needed to be done, they didn't observe any crashes during the short review period, and recommended re-assessing the situation in 30 years time. When the population of the city is expected to be more than double what it is right now. Great.

The silly speed limits on my commute are, frankly, way down on the priority list compared to issues like the one I just detailed. I could list more serious problems that are being ignored. And these issues are state or national highways, so the local council doesn't have the juristiction (or budget) to deal with them.

[โ€“] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

That doesn't sound good, but it's like...completely unrelated to this thread. Not sure why you brought it up.