LUKE ANSCOMBE
Protesters are demonstrating the widening of Lytton Road from four lanes to six as contractors continue to remove homes as part of Stage One of the Wynnum Road Corridor Upgrade.
Lytton Road resident Bernadatte Legoullon told the Source News she was concerned about the roadworks and the lack of council consultation.
“As a result of putting the two extra lanes they’re actually going to remove about 24 houses,” Ms Legoullon said.
“Basically a lot of these people in this street are facing forced resumptions of their homes, we’ve been going through a very fruitless consultation process where we’ve actually repeatedly this week argued to save the suburb for the sake of heritage.
“That’s been completely ignored.”
Brisbane City Council maintains the road works and home resumptions are to ease congestion along the busy road.
East Brisbane resident Julie Vincent is not going to lose her home due to the upgrade, but has called for the Council to stop the project.
“It’s not going to solve the congestion problem just widening these two 600-700 metres of road because there’s a bottleneck at the Story Bridge which is what stops the traffic that way and a bottleneck at Canning Bridge,” Ms Vincent said.
Councillor for the Gabba Ward, Jonathan Sri, said congestion could be eased in other ways.
“There’s quite a few different solutions that Council should have looked at before they went down the route of widening the road altogether,” Cr Sri said.
“The first and most obvious solution is to introduce peak hour transit lanes, these wouldn’t fix the problem overnight but they would encourage more people to car pool and they would provide busses with a faster priority route through the congested areas.
“The other thing we need to do obviously is to make sure the busses are coming frequently because there aren’t many public transport services along Lytton Road at the moment.”