When the ribbon was cut on Brisbane’s Story Bridge on 6 July 1940 it was not an auspicious time to open a new bridge.
Five days earlier, the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge had opened in Washington State.
In just four months that structure would make engineering history by dramatically swinging itself apart, a result of forces the engineering profession, at that time, did not understand.
As one of the investigators wrote, “bridge engineering is not, as popularly assumed, an exact science”.
In Brisbane, about 60,000 Queenslanders crossed the grand Story on opening day. The Courier-Mail enthused that it could take an extraordinary 40 cars a minute, despite the toll booths.
Premier William Forgan Smith paid tribute to its designer, John Bradfield. The former NSW public servant, who died in 1943, is better known for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Smith said the Story Bridge was “a lasting monument to his genius and ability”.
The giant structure – a decades-old dream that had employed hundreds of the otherwise destitute during the Great Depression – cost just £1.6m, the premier said. That’s about $77m in 2025 dollars; a bargain for a structure that is often described these days as Australia’s second-most famous bridge.
Eighty-five years later, the ratepayers of Brisbane face a new inexact engineering challenge.
According to Brisbane mayor Adrian Schrinner, Bradfield’s monument may not last much longer – and it will cost millions more to repair than it did to build back in 1940.
After a report on its condition, released by the Brisbane city council this week, Schrinner’s advice is the best options include begging the state and commonwealth for aid, a new rate levy, bringing back tolls for the first time since 1947, or knocking it down and replacing it.
There have been rumblings of “problems” with the bridge for some time.
Cyclists and pedestrians have been banned from access to the bridge since the March cyclone, with little explanation.
This week, the mayor said there was concern that any weight on the footpaths bolted to the side of the bridge could cause “spalling”, knocking bits of concrete off the bottom. Protective netting will be installed below, he said. Heavy trucks continue to cross the main part of the bridge on a regular basis.
Brisbane is among Australia’s most car-dependent cities. Space for Cycling’s Belinda Ward said the bridge was one of the city’s few safe bike routes. Its two small cycling routes can carry about twice as many people as the six lanes of general traffic, per hour.
“The obvious thing to do in the meantime is to close at least one lane on the main part of the bridge to general traffic and open that up for people walking and cycling across,” she said.
There is not yet an estimated cost of the rebuild. But Schrinner compared the project to other bridge refurbishments that cost hundreds of millions.
Ward said that would amount to an enormous amount of money just to repair an inner-urban freeway. She said its users ought to pay for the repairs, as they did last century.
“It doesn’t seem right, honestly, to me, that people in regional Queensland or other Australian states should have to pay for the sort of ongoing funding of the Story Bridge,” she said.
“So why not put a toll on it? And then people might consider perhaps using the Clem Jones tunnel instead or going by the Gateway Bridge.”
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Griffith University transport planning professor Matt Burke said it was effectively inevitable that the bridge would need a rethink, probably with a pair of grade-separated bus lanes.
He said even removing the bridge wouldn’t cause disaster. Cities that remove their freeways – like London’s Hammersmith Bridge – often expect a huge increase in congestion, but instead find “traffic just dissipated”.
“More people caught public transport, people businesses adjusted when they do deliveries and other things. Kids were told, you’re not getting driven to school, you’re catching the bus now sunshine, just all sorts of small behavioural steps were taken.”
A six-lane freeway is “a pretty profligate use of scarce road space in the inner city,” he said.
Council is now planning a new temporary walking and cycling path to be attached to the bridge. It is expected to be done “in a matter of months”.
Brisbane city council is the southern hemisphere’s largest local government. But even it is facing financial trouble, slashing hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs to make up the budget.
The council opposition criticised Schrinner this week for overspending on troubled projects like several other bridges and over-budget road projects. Opposition leader Jared Cassidy said the bridge has been deemed an “at risk structure” since 2016 but ignored.
But the mayor said the bridge was designed to last a century, and he needs state and commonwealth cash to keep it going beyond that date.
“Giving the Story Bridge a funeral for its 100th birthday is not acceptable. We have got the skill sets to fix it, and we will fix it, and we’ll all be terribly proud of what we’re creating,” Schrinner said.
The commonwealth government has already offered a helping hand, partially funding a business case for the full refurbishment. It is due in mid 2027. State and federal ministers signalled this week they would only consider supporting the project further after it has been completed.
Griffith’s Burke said the repair job could cost up to a billion dollars.
“It’s not going to be cheap and it’s going to be very disruptive. And that’s just what happens with assets of this age,” he said.
“The risk of collapse within the next 10 to 15 years is material. Australians are used to a very high standard of maintenance on their roadway systems, their bridges, etc. We do not tolerate a lot of risk.”
