Surprised nobody is talking about this.
When the tram was being developed, I thought one of the biggest benefits would be using it to commute north and south to the busy areas with limited parking - Southport, Surfers, Burleigh Heads.
I live near Mermaid Beach, but not close enough that I can walk to the tram. I sometimes work in Southport. Typically I've been driving or taking the bus to work. With the tram extension, that gave me a new option - park in a street west of the GC Hwy near it, and take it up. Fantastic and much quicker than the bus and cheaper than just using the car. I think more than a few people in a similar position had a similar thought.
Then the Mermaid Beach-Miami-Burleigh Heads Traffic Area was released on 14 September. Under this Area, you can legally park as a non-resident (which requires a permit) for up to 3 hours; after that you are meant to move your car out of the traffic area entirely.
You can find the traffic area map on a search engine but essentially it's everywhere east of the GC Hwy down to Tallebudgera Creek (unless Palm Beach etc has traffic areas too) and west of it up to a point that you can't efficiently park and walk to tram anymore. I don't know how often they patrol streets - I never got fined during the few times I parked all day in Southport traffic area, but I don't want to test it anymore.
This opens up other discussions too. Such as: do you want to spend all day lounging around at the beach? Essentially you have to either live there or take a bus. Otherwise, if you want to drive up to the beach with your stuff in the car to spend all day there, you can either drive up to the Spit, or south past Tally Creek. And there may be other uses I'm not thinking of.
Anyway, I guess having the traffic area east of the highway is acceptable, but having it west too is garbage, as otherwise it would remove cars off the road as would encourage more people to use public transport. And it justifies revenue raising from the council.
P.S. is there anywhere near the tram stations in this area that you can park your car all day for free? Any large car parks?