The whole Quirk report and it's costings seem a bit ify. For example the Carrara option findings:
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Costed at $461 million to temporarily upgrade it to 40k.
Except we had the Comm games at Carrara in 2018 and as far as I can find it only cost $6 million to temporarily upgrade it to 35k.
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For the relocation of the Olympic village - Construction or purchasing hasn't even been done yet as no funds have been allocated. So it's really just transferring funds down there, net cost wouldn't be too different you wouldn't think, maybe even less with Carrara land values being lower than Brisbane City. And don't tell me theres not enough room. Around Carrara itself theres plenty (and was the initial plan for the Comm games village), let alone what they could do with the already planned Robina village. Some densification around Nerang Station certainly wouldn't hurt our PT usage rates.
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In terms of Public Transport;
It seemed to cope pretty well during the Commonwealth games. Theres only been upgrades since e.g. Cross River Rail, Highway upgrades. Can't really see much difference from 35k for Comm games to 40k for the Olympics. If you needed to, just build couple of bus lanes from Nerang station to Carrara. Would be useful for future events as well.
Also with Carrara being REQUIRED to host T20 games, I think it's a fair tradeoff to host the Athletics and have the T20 played at any number of cricket grounds around the country, just as the football is.
To me it seems they had the option they wanted in mind during the whole report and gave the numbers and recommendation they thought would get it over the line (with some extra $$$ to gold plate it). Makes me question all of the figures given in the report. If the report gave $100 million for Carrara and $600 million for QSAC, with a large portion of that providing legacy benefits for Athletics, the coversations would be alot different.
Purely speculation, but the way both political parties have came out strongly against new stadium builds, it would not surprise me if the IOC has got into their ear and reminded them that part of these Olympics was the low cost model with building of cheaper Athletics stadiums and greater use of exisiting Rectangular stadiums.
The amount of extra bids the Olympics would get if they offered the option of spending lower amounts on Oval stadiums and greater use of existing large rectangular stadiums, like what 90% of the world has in place already. There's only an Olympics every 4 years, so to show future bidders, they need to do it in these games.
You, just like all Prictorian AFL fans are salty that Brisbane's premier stadium is and will remain rectangular as it should be
