21 December 2019 - 100 Homes Affected

100 homes affected? Ah, that's not so bad then, is it? Further on in that Gold Coast Bulletin article we learn that the "100 homes" are mentioned in the context of only one small section of the Coomera Connector, a sparsely populated area (Gold Coast Division 1) where the road would go mostly through cane fields. The real number for the whole 45 km of that corridor is many times higher. How high? That depends on how affected. Air pollution can have observable negative effects on health up to 1.5 km from the road. That's tens of thousands of people affected (* see below for calculation). Could the TMR Department and the Labor and Liberal/National parties look into that before building a 6-lane motorway through populated areas? https://sandiego.urbdezine.com/2015/05/28/what-is-a-safe-distance-to-live-or-work-near-high-auto-emission-roads/ https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/a-quarter-of-angelenos-breathe-244224

* The potential area of highly elevated traffic-related pollution: 45km * 1.5km * 2 = 135 km2. Current population density along the corridor varies greatly. In Coomera, the density was 612 people per 1 km2 in 2017: https://population.com.au/sa2/309071251  Assuming that eventually all land around the Coomera Connector would be built up with similar density, the number of people living within 1.5km from it would be about 83 thousand.