This is a guest post by Stuart McCarthy, who is the Brisbane coordinator for the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil. He has 20 years of experience in engineering, logistics, disaster relief, security, risk analysis and planning in Australia, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

Today’s traffic problems in Australia’s fastest growing city, Brisbane, result from decades of neglect by a succession of state and local governments. Not long after being elected into office in 2004 on a platform of alleviating the city’s traffic congestion, Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman announced that Brisbane City Council would proceed with Queensland’s largest public-private partnership to construct the North South Bypass Tunnel (NSBT), part of his TransApex project. From the outset, Newman has seen his role as “getting on with the job of reducing traffic congestion problems in Brisbane.” Unfortunately Newman made one flawed assumption that plagued the project’s planning from the beginning and will soon likely see its demise – cheap oil.

 Cheap oil has proved costly for previous transport infrastructure investments. Among these is the Fremantle Passenger Terminal, built in the early 1960s at a cost of £1.5 million, approximately $30 million in today’s dollars, to accommodate growing demand from passengers arriving from Europe during the “populate or perish” immigration era. What Western Australia’s planners did not foresee was that growing world production of cheap oil was simultaneously triggering the explosion of cheap international air travel. Within two decades passenger arrivals plummeted to two per cent of their 1965 peak and the facility became largely redundant.