An online petition calling for Brisbane’s road tolls to be scrapped has drawn 1,509 signatures, and two of the routes in its sights sit close to home for residents of Ascot, Eagle Farm, and Hendra: the Airport Link tunnel and the Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges.
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The Airport Link runs underground from the inner city, connecting to the Clem7 at Bowen Hills and travelling north through Kedron and Toombul before linking to the East-West Arterial Road leading to Brisbane Airport. The Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges, known to most as the Gateway, cross the river at Eagle Farm and link the area south to Murarrie via the Gateway Motorway.
The e-petition, lodged with the State of Queensland, targets both routes along with the Go Between Bridge, the Clem7, and Legacy Way — five roads that together recorded around 490,000 trips since June 2025.
Prices ticked up again on 1 January this year, adjusted in line with the Brisbane Consumer Price Index, which is another increase for commuters already managing rising living costs. For anyone using the tunnel regularly, the bill is not trivial.
Add the Gateway Bridge toll for those heading south across the river, and some local residents find themselves paying on both ends of a single trip, with no assurance the roads will be clear when they get there. Brisbane drivers lost an average of 84 hours to congestion in 2024, up 14 per cent on the year before.
The RACQ has weighed in, though not in favour of scrapping tolls outright. Dr Michael Kane, the motoring club’s head of public policy, said removing them would leave less money for new road projects, since the debts attached to existing infrastructure would still need to be paid, just by taxpayers instead of users. He also pointed out that toll roads were designed as a funding tool, not a fix for traffic, and suggested the real need was a wider rethink of how South East Queensland funds and plans its major roads.
A Transport and Main Roads spokesperson confirmed the petition would go through the standard process, without elaborating further.
Calls to wind back Brisbane’s toll network are nothing new in Queensland. Back in 2018, then Deputy Premier Jackie Trad singled out the Go Between Bridge as a toll that made little sense, given it bypasses the city centre entirely. She argued that commuters crossing between the city’s north and south should not be charged for the privilege. Seven years on, the toll is unchanged.
The Story Bridge has also entered the conversation recently, with proposals floated to fund a long-term fix for the ageing structure through a new toll. Numbers crunched at the time suggested a toll pegged to the same rate as the Gateway bridges could bring in more than $205 million annually within two years.
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For people living in Ascot, Eagle Farm, and Hendra, these tolled routes are not abstract policy talking points — they are part of the daily commute. Whether Queensland acts on the petition or files it away, the question of who pays for these roads is not going away.
Published 13-March-2026
