The future of rest stops in Queensland

Attended a public forum by Department of Tourism, Major Events, Small Business and the Commonwealth Games to develop best practice guidelines for rest stops in Queensland. The following is for information,

The project has conveniently separated camping from rest areas and camping was ruled out of scope for this session. Surprisingly a lot of public representatives were there to express a view about camping. This session was advised that separate project was under way titled Camping Options Toolkit for Councils which was workshopped in Oct 2013 and will release its findings in March this year.
The attendees were keen to discuss the camping issues and it highlighted that it is not simple to separate “resting” and “camping” which the presenter described as a grey area. Interestingly it was stated that rest areas guidelines were in part addressing camping in existing rest areas and trucking rest areas. I expressed concern that these guidelines should NOT result in closure of existing rest areas merely because they longer complied with the new best practice guideline. The response was not particularly encouraging as the presenter suggested that there was no legislative power to do so.

So the focus for this workshop was just rest areas which after a long presentation concluded that, after extensive research by the presenters, we would like a range of things like working toilets, rubbish disposal and shelters. There are also a number of standards regarding engineering, access and signage. There were very good suggestions from the audience but to be honest there was precious little time for comment for a 100 or so attendees.

The bottom line is that rest areas will become a local council/non-profit/commercial problem and there seemed very few funding solutions for rest stops that will include the type of services suggested by this workshop. The one area of leverage may be fatigue management where there is a need for government to provide safe roads for road users. This issue seems to have been picked up by the RACQ. I didn’t leave there thinking that there world of rest stops will dramatically change for the better unless commercial interests in tourism underwrite these changes as they are the main beneficiaries of “doubling tourism by 2020”.

Everyone is encouraged to complete a feedback survey on rest stops.
Rest stop survey