Brisbane

A comment he put in the replies to his post:

Someone asked which road projects would be cut to fund this idea...

It's important to stress that we're not proposing to cut the road maintenance budget. We're proposing to stop spending so much money on widening roads and building new roads - that's very different to resurfacing existing roads.

This year's council budget allocates $103 million towards road network resurfacing (slightly higher than usual because they're still repairing damage from February 2022). Usually the LNP allocate about $90 million per year towards this. (See page 260 of the budget: https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/2023-06/20230612-Annual-Plan-and-Budget-2023-24_0.pdf)

Personally I think the council should be INCREASING its resurfacing budget slightly (maybe keep it at $100 million on an ongoing basis) because it's cheaper and more sustainable to resurface roads BEFORE they get too cracked and the potholes get too big.

As to the question of which roads wouldn't get widened...

Each year, the LNP announces new road-widening and intersection-widening projects. They have a VERY long list of corridors that they'd like to widen. (You can see just a small selection of this list in the LGIP Schedule of Works documents - https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/planning-and-building/planning-guidelines-and-tools/local-government-infrastructure-plan/lgip-components-extrinsic-material-and-supporting-documents)

This image is an excerpt from the 2023-24 budget and gives you a flavour of the sorts of costs of these major road projects. For this financial year, there's over $35 million of road-widening/intersection capacity expansion just in those four projects in that image, with more spending in subsequent years.

There are many many more road-widening projects in the budget under headings like 'Suburban Corridor Modernisation,' 'Major Road Network Improvements,' 'Better Roads for Brisbane,' 'Congestion Busting Projects' etc.

The LNP's total spend on road-widening and intersection-widening varies a little bit from year to year, but currently averages about $250-$300 million per year (depends a bit on how you define and quantify projects that involve a degree of road-widening but also other kinds of improvements). Almost all of that money is being wasted on road-widening that won't reduce congestion and will simply encourage more cars onto the road.

Many of the intersections that the LNP are spending money on DO need to be redesigned to improve safety, add bike lanes, improve pedestrian connectivity etc, but they don't need to be widened. They could be upgraded to prioritise active transport for a fraction of the cost (and those intersection redesign costs are factored into the $90 million/year we're proposing to put towards bike infrastructure).

So I can't give you a specific list of which roads won't be widened, because we don't know for sure exactly which roads the LNP would like to widen next. All I can say is that each year they consistently spend a couple hundred million widening different roads, and we would stop doing that.