Between a rock and a hard place: the Kingsford Smith Drive upgrade Thursday, 21 June 2018

Brisbane City Council is committed to taking real action on traffic congestion and is upgrading Kingsford Smith Drive with more lanes, better intersections and dedicated bikeways. The Kingsford Smith Drive upgrade will involve widening the road from four to six lanes between Theodore Street at Eagle Farm and Cooksley Street at Hamilton. It will also include improvement works between Cooksley Street and Breakfast Creek Road at Albion. The upgrade will also deliver significantly improved pedestrian and cycle facilities in the form of a new cantilevered RiverWalk.

From an engineering perspective, a constrained corridor can be a challenge at the best of times, but a carriageway in a dense residential area, bordered on one side by a river, presents further difficulties.

The northern side of Kingsford Smith Drive is lined with residential properties, some of which are heritage-listed, along with two heritage-listed retaining walls. To meet heritage requirements and keep land resumptions to a minimum, much of the works to widen Kingsford Smith Drive are taking place on the southern side of the road and in the Brisbane River itself.

The new RiverWalk will be a fixed, cantilevered structure sitting on more than 150 piles anchored into the riverbed. A suite of barges, support vessels, cranes, piling rigs, excavators and augers all help make the project’s marine construction program possible, along with a separate marine logistics facility where materials are produced and prepared for use.

As part of the upgrade, a designated marine construction area was established to complete the river-based works. These works include repositioning a cruise ship navigation beacon, demolishing existing marine structures and removing and storing several existing pontoons and jetties.

Working from barges in the river, more than 300 scour-protection mattresses have been installed to manage and minimise erosion and stabilise the riverbed to provide support to the piles. Piling for the cantilevered RiverWalk structure is now complete with 165 piles (using more than 5800 cubic metres of concrete) now in place, marking a major milestone for the project.

Following the completion of piling, barge-mounted cranes were used to lift pre-cast concrete fascia panels into place to form the bulk of the retaining wall, allowing a concrete backslab to be poured behind them to balance the cantilever over the river.

The same cranes then positioned pre-cast cantilever panels into place, each weighing up to 50 tonnes, to provide the formwork for pouring the RiverWalk’s concrete deck. Finally, road pavement will be installed on the structure and topped off with the final road furniture and line marking.

Place these works against a backdrop of a river used for everything from canoeing to public ferries, a road carrying more than 75,000 vehicles per day and a maze of underground services, and you start to get an idea of just some of the challenges the Kingsford Smith Drive upgrade poses.

Once the upgrade is complete, Kingsford Smith Drive will be transformed into a tree-lined boulevard, linking some of Brisbane’s most significant industrial, commercial and residential areas. This upgrade will create travel time savings as part of Council’s plan to get residents home quicker and safer. For more information or to register for updates, call Council's project team on 07 3403 8888 or visit brisbane.qld.gov.au and search ‘Kingsford Smith’.

Article submitted by: Brisbane City Council.

Image source: Brisbane City Council.