Cr Pugh’s claims in The Echo (24.7.24) that he’s fit to be reelected to council for another term are curious. Particularly his claim of: ‘I have demonstrated my credentials to the community to put myself forward for mayor’. So, ignoring the decades-long transport needs of the community and wasting eyewatering amounts of public money destroying a billion-dollar train line for a trail for cycling tourism, rather than demanding the state government provide the essential train service which is their responsibility, is ‘demonstrating credentials’ to represent the community?
As experienced rail engineers have said, and Cr Pugh’s photo shows, this bike trail could be built beside the train line for around $50,000 per kilometre, not $600,000. What a shocking waste of public money.
Cr Pugh’s claim that his push for the Rail Trail to be extended through Byron Shire will be a benefit to the area needs to be examined. The Tweed section of trail cost taxpayers $14.4m for just 24 kilometres of track for cycling tourism. The state government claimed $88m needed to be spent on the train line over ten years, $8.8m per year, to keep the one daily XPT train running for 2,500 passengers per week. Tweed Council claims that just 1,200 people per week used the free trail in the March quarter this year, when the weather was mostly fine. According to a bike hiring business, few people were using the trail, or hiring bikes, during the wet weather. This means in twelve months a total of 62,400 people at most would use the trail.
The cost of this trail does not stack up compared to one daily train service which carried 130,000 paying passengers per year and returned fifty per cent of cost, $11m per year. The commuter train service which politicians promised and rightly claimed would cost less than the bus service that replaced the train is much better value. A commuter train service, paid for by the state government, not ratepayers, would carry many more people, reconnect local towns and connect the region up the to Queensland rail system and the airports, while taking millions of cars off our roads.
According to Byron Shire Council’s Draft Sustainable Visitation Strategy 2020-2030, the top three issues raised by a thousand locals during the engagement phase of the study were traffic congestion, road conditions and parking. Given there’s been little economic benefits to businesses from the trail in the Tweed, and apart from a new bicycle shop in Mooball which is only open five days a week, no new jobs have been created. At the very least Cr Pugh should tell 16,000 Byron ratepayers how much rates will have to rise to cover the millions/billions it will cost for new roads and road maintenance to cater for the increasing traffic of over three million visitors per year to the area. Roadworks will cost much more than the train services which will reduce the cars on our roads, while reducing the toxic emissions from road transport causing catastrophic climate disasters.
At the very least, rather than relying on anecdotal evidence of the economic benefits and numbers using the bike track, an independent evaluation of the environmental, social and economic benefits to the community and taxpayers of the Tweed section of the trail needs to be done before one more cent of public money is spent on this bike track.
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