Campbell Newman burst on to the political scene in 2002 with tunnel vision – a "TransApex" of toll roads the then-lord mayoral candidate promised would transform Brisbane.
But it will be at least a decade, if ever, before the TransApex proposal comes close to being completed.
Fifteen years on, that vision has mostly been realised, with the completion of the Clem7, Legacy Way and the state-funded Airport Link tunnels.
The proposed tunnel between Hale Street and Merivale and Cordelia streets in South Brisbane was eventually substituted for the Go Between Bridge.
While popularity of those expensive pieces of infrastructure, delivered at a combined cost of almost $10 billion, has not lived up to expectation, lord mayor Graham Quirk has long said they should be judged over decades of use as south-east Queensland continued to grow.
There remained a notable absence – East-West Link, between Toowong and Buranda – that has fallen off the City Hall agenda.
TransApex by Brisbane Times on Scribd
Cr Quirk said it was unlikely to be revived during his time in office.
"That'll be a decision in years ahead, but I can't see a business case being in place for that for probably another 10 years," he told Fairfax Media this week.
"It would need to be looked at in terms of potential viability at that time. That's why I had no hesitation in taking it off the agenda.
"There's no point in doing these things for the sake of it.
"Unless they meet a reasonable demand, it's just not worth the public expenditure."
That meant Cr Quirk would not be cutting any more ribbons at a tunnel entrance.
"Its day may come, but it won't be any time soon based on existing demand," he said.
"It will not be in my political lifetime."
Griffith University road and transport researcher Matthew Burke said East-West Link would be an "idea that will continue to be bounced around", along with other projects such as the long-mooted western ring road/bypass.
"TransApex in a sense was the completion of the central ring road of the 1965 Wilbur Smith transportation plan for Brisbane, which was the plan that set out an overall framework for a freeway network for the city," he said.
That plan, commissioned by then-lord mayor Clem Jones, was what ultimately led to the closure of Brisbane's tram network.
Along with ring roads, it included an underground rail project similar to the Cross River Rail, which has been identified as the most critical piece of Queensland infrastructure that needed to be built.
"There's a couple of key links of that plan that have never been built – a western Brisbane freeway, connecting the west to the north," Dr Burke said.
"I think that western Brisbane orbital of some description will come back in the next 10 years and I do think, probably 10 to 20 years from now, we might start to think again about East-West Link."
Dr Burke said constrictions on existing roads, however, could prove to be difficult to overcome.
"The downstream congestion impacts of an East-West Link on a constrained Western Freeway, which is very difficult to widen, and a Pacific Motorway, which we really don't need to attract more people to ... would be quite significant and that might prove quite troubling to us," he said.
"You only have to look at the Gateway Motorway merge with the Pacific Motorway to see what I mean by the kinds of issues that come when you connect up more and more of your infrastructure.
"Downstream congestion impacts can be really expensive to fix, as we're about to discover trying to widen the Pacific Motorway in Logan."
Cross River Rail had to remain the top infrastructure priority for Brisbane, Dr Burke said.
"I don't think people understand what a game-changer it will be for the entire rail network," he said.
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