Queensland’s so called ‘highway to hell’ election beat-up

Queensland’s coastal Bruce Highway was revived as an issue ahead of the State Election with the Opposition blaming the road toll fully on the highway itself — and therefore the State Government. Dr Lee Duffield took a long drive North for this report.

THE ACCUSATION goes that the highway is neglected and unable to handle the volume of traffic, making it a death trap and blight on the economy.

An example was the spectacular explosion in a collision at the township of Bororen last month, with one person killed. In such cases, a local Liberal National Party (LNP) member tells sympathetic journalists, for instance: The road was too narrow, it had inadequate shoulders, the surface was rough.

BAD OLD ROAD

My first inspection was a 1950s trip across the fabled “horror stretch” – Rockhampton to Mackay, – a 300-kilometre dirt road, often a track with numerous detour tracks for repairs. Convoys of cars would be caught between flooded creeks, or bogged in mud. Often you slept in the car in the bush because you could not get through your day’s run.

Long-term Labor governments had put everything into the railway, as an engine of economic development, and welfare institution providing secure jobs. Pressure came for sealed roads as more people could afford cars and as road transport entrepreneurs like Gordon Barton of Ipec demanded open roads and a “climate” for free enterprise, imagined as an extension of their private human rights. They and the farm lobby would get a kind of sealed road, though opponents said damage from semi-trailers would keep the sealed highway in need of constant repair.

The “Bruce’s” problem is that it runs 1800 kilometres with one major population centre at one end. Compared with, say, the Pacific Highway, in New South Wales, just 800 kilometres with major population centres all the way. It’s a bigger relative cost. Queensland’s summer downpours wreck road surfaces and if traffic is to keep flowing, demand higher-level bridges. With climate change, it gets worse.

The time for re-doing the “Bruce” arrived when the then-Country Party, now LNP, finally got elected and for re-election in 1960, promised a “bitumen ribbon from Cairns to Coolangatta”. Road travellers and truckies were glad enough to accept a crash program that provided most often a single-lane “ribbon” — one fairly narrow strip shared by traffic going both ways. 

By the 1970s it had become highly dangerous, inadequate for expanded numbers of cars, so many badly designed by safety standards of today. It demanded skill to keep up average speed while slowing and swerving off the bitumen to try and avoid getting the windscreen broken by stones from approaching traffic, often unsuccessfully. Another challenge was dicing with death to overtake, as lines of traffic built up behind a slow vehicle, with virtually no special lanes for overtaking. As a journalist, you routinely had to record multiple fatalities; the dreadful road toll was worse than now.

Laying the mean bitumen strip on sections of the old dirt road may have been the affordable option but then putting down a double lane over that later could have led to problems today with inadequate shoulders. The old single-lane road can still be gaped at where bypassed by the new one, like a section sign-posted at Marlborough North of Rockhampton. So, thinking politics: blame Labor for the slow start building a proper road and blame the LNP for doing it on the cheap and dangerous.

GREAT IMPROVEMENTS

Things have radically improved. Balancing the vital need to have this highway, against the limited population and money available to support it, the planners and engineers have done well. Modern-day evidence-based understanding, apart from technical issues with vehicles, says accidents mainly come down to handling speed, drug and alcohol abuse, and going to sleep at the wheel.

Characteristics of the Bruce Highway, Brisbane to Townsville, as recently inspected, include the following: 

1. Virtually the whole length has been straightened and drained. 
2. Dedicated overtaking lanes come up at regular intervals.
3. They have recognised the peril of not building dividers between traffic flowing in opposite directions, though for most of the way still, all that can be done is elaborate road painting with reflectors and the like.
4. The problem of nodding off is addressed through the construction of many new roadside rest areas and heavy signage saying ‘Take a break’.
5. The major reform is the attack on speed where the speed limit for long stretches stays at 100 kph.
6. Driving protocols can be very good; semi-trailer drivers on the highway help you get through and are rarely aggressive.

With tropical weather, an outstanding problem is potholing, especially close to the roadside. Road gangs respond quickly to potholes and also regularly mend damaged sections sign-posted as “rough surface”, but the filled potholes do start collapsing; not the jagged-edge new ones that cause structural damage, but near enough. The 1950s predictions of wear-and-tear were right and it is worse now because of SUVs replacing much smaller private vehicles.

Highway work is constant. For the last decade, you would always have to add a two-hour delay to the Brisbane to Townsville trip because of major road-building and major repairs. Much of that rebuilding went on between Childers and Rockhampton, where the resultant new highway sections, if still just two lanes commensurate with demand, are much wider, safer and smoother.

Some works have been enormous, not counting the multi-lane mega route from Coolangatta to past Noosa:

• the most-recent addition to this motorway, finishing between Cooroy and Gympie: 
• the five-year project building a by-pass around Gympie itself, eliminating 20-minute delays; or
• the elevated concrete highway strip built over the infamous Haughton River flood zone at Giru, near Townsville.

A regular practice, where extensive road damage has occurred, is to resurface whole sections of highway, from short distances to five kilometres, currently happening around Bowen. By an educated guess maybe half the length of the Bruce Highway has been replaced or re-built over the last ten years.

Why the griping?

Many drivers in 2024 want to see multi-lane motorways with hard surfaces extended everywhere, immediately and all governments have been trying to go that way. Though with far-flung routes like the Bruce Highway ranging through hundreds of kilometres of bush, they will not live to see the dream fulfilled.

Secondly, a lot of drivers hate the 100 kph speed limit, not accepting that while their vehicles can handle more speed, faster will push beyond the necessary design limitations of the road. In normal seasons, reason will prevail, most being content to keep lobbying authorities to keep on building. But leading to 26 October, playing politics with “the Bruce” went to new limits.

Amongst Dr Lee Duffield’s vast journalistic experience, he has served as ABC’s European correspondent. He is also an esteemed academic and member of the editorial advisory board of Pacific Journalism Review and elected member of the University of Queensland Senate.

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