The Pencil Guy: Hourann's illogical blog

The new Northbridge Link plan: could be worse

Wednesday 16 December 2009 at 9:09 pm

Artist's impression of the Northbridge Link plaza; Creative Commons licence does not apply to this image. Artist's impression of the Barnett government waterfront plan; Creative Commons licence does not apply to this image.

Forgive me a way-overdue (and backdated) post, but I’m still one of the top Google results for this, so I figure I ought to post something.

Back in November, the Barnett government released a newly-tweaked plan for “the Link”, the development site next to Perth train station. From the scant detail available, the plan doesn’t suck, and is of course better than what’s there now. But it’s also meagre in foresight (what good’s more open space without stuff around it to draw pedestrians?), and it still has the unfortunate feature of the railway not being underground all the way (alas, the promised Federal funding doesn’t go that far).

Likewise, the new waterfront plan announced a fortnight later is quite reasonable, and probably more realistic than the Carpenter government proposal, but still so far-off in funding and timelines that I expect no end of change between now and the start of construction.

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