Old roads need new solutions

Old roads in parts of Logan aren’t keeping up with current and future developments, local councillors have said.

One councillor, Tony Hall, has even called for a city-wide “roads reform”.

But the city’s roads director said there was not enough money to go around, and therefore more important upgrades had been prioritised.

At last week’s Logan City council infrastructure committee meeting, Cr Jacob Heremaia said Glen Road in Logan Reserve was “supporting a lot of traffic with not a lot of infrastructure”.

“A local resident reached out to me, and she said ‘more and more residents are moving into Logan Reserve’ but she’s not seeing upgrades appropriate to secure their safety,” Cr Heremaia said.

He said almost 200 houses had been built on Glen Road in four years, but it hadn’t been updated in decades.

The road is set to be rehabilitated in 2026, but that doesn’t include upgrades to accommodate higher traffic and capacity.

Cr Heremaia called for an investigation into the plans and potential improvements for the road.

“The precedent I think this will set is when there is a rural road that is one-way in, one-way out, that has experienced 190 houses being built on it in four years but hasn’t been touched in this section, council should do some homework and council should consider different options,” he said.

“There are many different funding options available.”

Multiple councillors agreed with the sentiment and said they had similar roads in their divisions.

Cr Hall said he would be “on board” with roads reform in order to speed up important upgrades.

“I’ve got a very similar problem to Cr Heremaia in that [my division] has growing pains,” he said.

“I’ve got a greenfield development… reliant on really old roads which were only ever designed for rural traffic, but they’ve got extreme residential development happening and a lot of traffic.

“The worst part of it is that as those greenfield areas are being developed, a lot of trucks are going through and some of these roads are really suffering under the weight.

“I think we’ve got a major issue here with some of these greenfield areas – their roads are just too old to take the traffic and the congestion.”

He said work on some of these roads was only likely to occur in the next 20 years.

“Council needs to re-look the way it is addressing these roads – I think we need to move them up in terms of a priority,” Cr Hall said.

“Roads should be our main priority right now.”

The city’s road and water director said although councillors represented certain divisions within the city, their duty was to act on “the benefit of the whole council”.

“That’s what priority funding is all about – taking a whole of council approach,” he said.

“What is the highest priority: a 200m section of Glen Road compared to the upgrade of Park Ridge Road that has thousands of properties – not hundreds?

“We do not have unlimited funding to be able to do every road.”

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