I can’t have been the only Queenslander who was extremely worried watching the Olympic opening ceremony on Saturday morning.
For the first time in history, it was held outside a stadium – instead travelling along 6km of the inner-city avenues and boulevards of the world’s most beautiful city, Paris. You got Marie Antoinette and a metal band. You got the Phantom of the Opera. You got parkour across the mansard copper roofs of ordinary residential five-story apartment buildings.
Oh God, I thought, we’ve only got eight years. How the hell do we compete with this?
Le Monde said it was a “parade like the travelling theatre troupes used to do centuries ago, when they crossed the city, with sets and costumes, to get the crowd excited before the performance”. The thing that struck me was the sense of the extraordinary inside the everyday. The procession passed normal residences using footpaths that are available to everyone, even if you can’t run a minute mile.
“Parade”, I thought? Where would we find six continuous kilometres of Brisbane footpath to hold a parade? If you took the traditional route along Coronation Drive – the name is not a coincidence – it’d be less of a celebration of the human and more a festival of four wheels: highway on ramps, multi-lane freeways, limited access expressway.
And how are all those people going to get there, anyway?
Saturday’s opening ceremony started at the Stade de France, the primary athletics venue for Paris 2024. It seated 80,000 long before the Olympics. It does not have a car park. Instead the French built a new Metro line next to the stadium for the Games. There’s also another Metro stop on a different line, plus two different heavy rail lines within walking distance. There are also buses and trams, bike lanes, pedestrian infrastructure.
Our plan is to accommodate 40,000 people at a new facility 10km south of the CBD at a stadium abandoned by the Brisbane Broncos in 2003 because it was too hard to get to. There are no train stops. We might figure out one bus route there at some point. We will spend around $1.6bn building a new stadium there for the occasion.
And as for the nice boulevards?
Brisbane banned not just the five-storey apartments with a mansard roof but all medium-density housing down to the level of the mere townhouse 139 years ago. At the time they said this was out of fear of fire and infectious disease but it was arguably about classism and racism. This ban is probably the most lasting planning rule in Queensland and still has bipartisan support; it was reconfirmed five years ago near-unanimously.
And then I remembered the 2028 Olympics will be held at Los Angeles and groaned again.
Brisbane is a pale imitation of the city of angels. In perhaps the most damaging example of the cultural cringe, commissioner of main roads Charles Barton, who travelled to LA in the 1960s and fell in love with the city, sponsored a plan to make Brisbane just like it.
At the time, Brisbane had one of the country’s biggest public transport networks; 109km of trams. It carried 160 million passengers in a single year at its peak.
Together with lord mayor Clem Jones, Barton agreed that this was all terribly old-fashioned. They hired an American consultancy firm, Wilbur Smith, which told them what they wanted to hear: the trams needed to go, to make way for the car.
Smith designed an LA-style gigantic network of freeways. The river – which Paris employed to such effect as a backdrop – was set aside for cars, as were entire suburbs torn up for more roads. Trams were replaced by buses, because they were more “flexible”. That means they’re easier for planners to cut for more cars.
By design, public transport use plummeted, and congestion dramatically increased. A recent study found that Brisbane now has the worst access to public transport of Australia’s five biggest cities; just 33% of residents have a usable stop within walking distance. Another study found it has the worst congestion in the country. So at least that’s one thing we can show off.
In Paris, in the run up to the Games, the government has built 1,300km of new bike lanes, near-banned cars from 180 streets, designed four new metro routes; 200km of new track and 68 new stations. The city plans to remove 70,000 car parking spaces to slash congestion.
Brisbane was sold the Games on the basis it would mean better transport connections, but there doesn’t seem to be a strategy for them. Our plan seems to be to upgrade an existing bus rapid transit system into a bus rapid transit system.
Paris is built for people; our city is built for cars.
I defy anyone to show me a benefit to all this cost. Brisbane takes 105 times as much land to house 2.28 million people as Paris does for 2.1 million people. That’s not just a wildlife catastrophe, it’s a climate bomb. Transport is Queensland’s second-greatest source of carbon emissions.
And of course, it’s of no benefit to the ordinary Queenslander, as proven by one of Australia’s worst housing crises. Some of us drive an hour or more to work every day.
There’s not much hope of us fixing all of this in time for 2032, but surely this contrast shows it’s time to start.
In the desperate search for an Olympics “legacy” for Brisbane 2032, maybe we can find it in my misery – perhaps showing our city to the world will be the wake-up call we need.
Fun fact: urban planning used to be an event at the Olympics. Paris surely would win gold. Brisbane would be Eric the Eel.