I understand what nightstalker is saying but as he states there is clearly a need in Brisbane. Traffic is terrible. His issue is whether people will pay. I'm sure business will as it'll probably save that in just petrol costs/wear and tear etc. as it really does cut out a congested area of Brisbane. As for others....well, it seems they pay in Melbourne and Sydney so I expect they'll pay here too.
As to the numbers. I sit with a view of the story bridge at work. It currently takes about 100000 vehicles a day. It's two lanes each way just like Clem 7 and in the morning it crawls, in the afternoon it crawls and the rest of the day it's busy. I expect clem 7 will have a much higher minimum speed so it shouldn't look as busy as the story bridge but it's still an awful lot of vehicles to get 100000 in a day.
The inner city bypass does approx. 70000 vehicles a day and whenever I'm on it I would consider the traffic to be medium to light in density. Unless you are trying to get onto coronation drive where it crawls afternoons and mornings.
The big plus for Clem7 is it does have some very busy roads feeding it at either end and it's no surprise to me that this is the tunnel of most need out of the 5 proposed tunnels for Brisbane.
The gateway is a toll bridge and it gets almost 100000 vehicles so you'd expect a 5 km road with good feeder roads to pull at least 80000 vehicles if not similar to the gateway over time despite it being more expensive.
I'm actually expecting more than 5000 vehicles to be added when the bris connections road opens. This will really give a reason for those on the southside to use the road as currently I can see a big demand for those on the north side to get to Wollongabba etc. but I don't believe there will be as much traffic in the other direction unless it is easy to get to the airport. I think bris connections could add 20% to traffic numbers without too much trouble.
As to ramp up, I can only go on figures for other toll roads and it seems within 6 months of opening they hit 90% of their 18 month target (first month 60%). You can add a bit for bris connections opening in 2012 but we shall shortly see if this business is a real goer or not.
RCY Price at posting:
30.5¢ Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Not Held
