The stations are Morningside, Lindum, Banyo, and Buranda btw.
Getting the disability upgrades done is super important, and to be honest that price seems pretty good, especially when you compare with the absurd amounts we spend on road infrastructure “upgrades”.
But holy shit. 10 months of the station being fully closed‽ Surely there must be a better way?
Turrella station in Sydney has maintained full function during the (still ongoing) elevator installation and stairs rebuild. They’ve installed temporary stairs on one end. The contractors can be as slow as they want, all it does is make people have to walk an extra 50m.
It’s had some shutdowns, but for other work (wires & tracks & signals) and typically short.
I can sort of see why for some of them, if they’re realigning and completely redoing some of them then that does make sense, but I’m not really sure about the whole closing the entire station for that long part. Obligatory I don’t live in Brisbane, but I do love in Melbourne and we’ve had a lot of stations completely demolished and rebuilt in less time than that. I’m guessing there’s some tradeoff between money and time though. Easy to get stations up quickly if you pay people to work on it 24/7, including weekends but that does blow the budgets out big time
But even still, I’m not sure an entire 10+ months of closures for a cheap price is the best tradeoff to be making, though I suppose it is better than spending double the amount on half the stations
Yes it’s a tradeoff between time and money. Successful contractors like to split their staff thin across many jobs rather than concentrate them on a few, the risks are lower and unintended delays are more easily absorbed.
Also it’s common for 10 months at cost ‘x’ to really become 20 months and cost ‘2x’ (especially if it was a highly competitive bidding process with multiple similar jobs available, which this might be).
Was Auchenflower station closed at all during it’s recent upgrade?
now everyone’s commute will be handicapped
