Distances from the motocross property to selected dwellings in the area

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last month.  On December 7th we got a call from a friend in our area who had just found out that there had been an application to establish a motocross park about 2.7km (about 2 miles) from us.

It had actually been advertised by public notice in our local paper, a week or so before, but no one we know had seen it.  As a result, we had only 11 days to lodge objections to the planning department of our local government (Lockyer Valley Regional Council).

From that point on everything else in our lives was put on hold.  For about a week we got by on around four hours’ sleep per night, and in the last month we’ve only completely stopped working on this on Christmas day.

A fantastic group of people from the area and wider came together to oppose the motocross track in our area.  If you ever want to create community quickly, drop something like this on a neighbourhood.  We now have a much wider circle of friends and a community group that is actively fighting this proposal and has already started on longer term projects like a neighbourhood Koala monitoring program.

The period for public comment closed on December 18th.  We don’t know the total number of objections that were lodged, but we know of at least 200 that were delivered to the Council offices.  An amazing effort to galavnize that much support in 11 days.

We calculated that there are more than 900 people living within 4km of the motocross property, so that’s a lot of people to be affected by the noise and other impacts.

As you can see from the above map, this is a rural area, where zoning is largely Rural Uplands, Rural Agricultural, Rural General or Rural Residential.  Not the sort of place where you’d put a noisy motocross development with high traffice levels (up to 150 vehicles/hour) on narrow rural roads.

Our community has established a website and an online petition.  Please, have a look at the website and sign the petition (you can also link to it from the website), and leave a comment about motocross noise on the petition, particularly if you’ve ever been exposed to it.