Thomas Draper
Traffic restrictions are bad for business whether you are in hamburgers or diamond rings.
Surveys have proved Noosa Shire residents love their cars. It’s a fact.
Difficulty in parking has led to residents staying away from Hastings Street.
For customers to remain loyal they need assured parking nearby anytime.
A really good architect who knows what is meant by ‘village feel’ is needed.
New garage buildings in Noosa should shroud the internal ‘container’ effect and fit in to the landscape in colour and form. A design competition is suggested.
The current Corporate Plan and Transport Strategy avoids solutions that will foster business growth and sustainability.
Drawing TDP-0048 hereby illustrates as a suggestion, what is needed now in Langura Street, out of sight, and out of the minds of the ‘villagers’, to cater for 600 day tripper vehicles.
If you look again at Drawing TDP-0048 a Red Transit Lane between The J and Lions Park, depicted, should take micro bus shuttles from the above mentioned Langura Street garage via the Junction roundabout to the base of Lions Park.
Note as a matter of urgency, that the above proposed Transit lane next to Noosa Drive is threatened to be vanquished by a wide boardwalk and cycling lane ‘up its guts’ published in the public domain last year.
Funding must be blocked.
Tom Draper submitted better boardwalk/ bicycle lane solutions to achieve the same end to Councillors on 10 May 2023. No response was received. Alternatives are outlined in Concept 3 next week.
Council failed to give Noosa Parade a transit lane as recommended in the very expensive Parsons Brinckerhof expert consultants report of 2016.
How can the public allow best advice from world renowned experts to be ignored.
Council appears to be making the same mistake again, this time on Noosa Drive blocking any chance in future of smarter people correcting errors without incurring extraordinary expense on somebody else’s watch.
Managing tourism FLOW as Tom Draper suggests, should reduce tourism’s effect on broader industry. (His specialty is production engineering.)
Garages should offer bookings and charge for parking and eV charging on a sliding scale.
All garages should feature air taxi 2-passenger vertiports as already built at Paris 2024 Olympics, Manhattan and JFK. Worth researching online ‘Joby Dayton Ohio’.
Some asphalt parking areas on the Spit and in the Woods may be returned to nature and part of Claude Batten Drive widened.
Council should find itself in a win-win situation through collecting garage parking fees from many of the 300 vehicles that currently park unprotected at Noosa Spit (except river mouth) and Noosa Woods west, for nothing.
This is the second of several concepts created by retired engineer Thomas Draper to fix Noosa’s traffic issues. See concept three next week on alternative cycling/boardwalks.
