Don't tell anyone, but I have a fetish for bridges. To me, Brisbane as exciting a playground as River Walk Woolworths lingerie counter is for ... well, never mind for whom, just accept that I'm having a lot of fun with bridges.
Ltd 2 1 pic/post (hmm, that's not too shabby an impersonation of a twitter-twatter, perhaps I should change my genre), it was difficult to decide which of 15+ bridges should illustrate this edition of JDW's Things You Neither Need or Want to Know. The new pedestrian crossing from North to South Bank (unless you live on the other side in which case it is from South to North) would have been a good choice. imsho, it demonstrates how very wrong you can go by designing something on a computer without really studying where you are going to put it in real life. The glorious confusion of "masts, yards and rigging" would be glorious in isolation but tucked on the river bend above those beautifully gliding and dipping motorways suspended over the mangroves and water but between that bridge and the other on the bend around the starkly crisp cultural centre and thumping big fig with a water dragon the thing is as much of a mess as this paragraph. So, no pic.
The new bus/pedestrian bridge into UQ (that's the Uni of QLD and not Queensland Varsity) is not only a clever idea but a very satisfying construction - along the lines of my favourite bridge on the way to Oliver Tambo. Speaking of UQ, Australian university students are very young; or at least they look a lot more callow than I know I was as a student.
Bridges. The pic is of the Gateway Bridge, as I imagine it was soon after it was finished in the early 80s; back when it was proud to know that it had been designed to "cater for traffic growth well into the 21st century". At 64.5 metres high and stretching 1.63 kilometres across the Brisbane River, with its main span 260 metres long (the longest in the world at the time), it easily carried 17,000 vehicles a day when opened in 1986.
Yesterday Les and I crossed it - alongside about 999,999 other vehicles (and that's not an exageration) (why does blogger not have an automatic spell check?). In Les's silver Mercedes 350 LSC (two balding silver heads hidden under matching caps with the roof down and 200kg of kevlar mainsail on my lap). Hardly into the 21st Century, that bridge is woefully inadequate and so they are building another one alongside it. Just like that. The cost must be staggering but, I suppose, as long as the Chinese keep buying iron ore and other commodities, there's a good chance that the bill will be met.
Now, I'm afraid, I'm going to have to be a bit critical and offer some advice to a certain sister-ex-law. Les and I were heading to Manly to get the repaired mainsail onto the boat so that we can save time before sailing on Saturday. (Yes, I am very excited at the prospect). We ground to a halt on the Gateway. Behind a bumper sticker "Stuck behind another bloody Volvo owner". Alongside a truck with a serious exhaust system and seriously random music on the iPod. We phoned Janet who said, "Why are you still only there? I've just checked Google Maps and there are no traffic problems!" In a way, she and Google were right. "Traffic" suggests movement. If there's no movement, there's no traffic and therefore no traffic problems. It took us a very long time to cross that 1.63 km span.
But it was worth it.
PS: Janet, next time try http://www.ourbrisbane.com/transport/traffic-cameras/traffic-camera-gateway-bridge.
PPS: Les, next time try 05h45 and not 16h15.
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