Things like the metro bus wouldn’t really compete with rail patronage if the railway services were fast and frequent, the areas the busways serve are nowhere near any rail lines so if people are taking it instead of the railways then it seems to me that’s more of an indictment of QR’s inadequacies than BCC’s disinterest in integrating bus services with heavy rail services.
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From my understanding of WA, the public transport system there basically completely broke down by the 80s which meant that they had to reform things then. The same thing happened in Auckland by the 90s. While in Brisbane the public transport provision stayed just barely adequate for the needs of the city until now where its starting to really show its inadequacies for the type of city Brisbane developed into. Reforms are urgently needed but I fear that if the state government took over public transport we may very well end up being worse off than the current situation if the state government starts running buses like trains. Remember outside of Brisbane councils have no role in public transport provision and except for the Gold Coast there PT offerings are actually more inadequate. As an example Cairns doesn’t even have a bus to the airport and people are left walking on a main road in the heat.
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I agree the frequencies on the rail network are largely woeful.
I believe with some staffing rostering changes, 15 minute frequencies could be implemented pretty much tomorrow to Manly (potentially Cleveland with some possible reliability issues), Kuraby, Springfield Central, Ferny Grove (already done but could do with it on weekends as well), Redcliffe, Shorncliffe and the Airport. I think theoretically Caboolture and Ipswich could do it too. The rollingstock is there, it’s just the drivers and guards that need rostering.
If that happened, bus services could be co-ordinated better and that would make a massive difference.
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I’ve actually figured out that QR could very much extend the Coopers Plains short runs to Kuraby right now without conflicting with express trains by using the middle track exclusively.
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Could they with the rollingstock? They’re reliant on 3-cars a lot lately to fill the network’s schedule.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the 3 car services are mostly during the peak? However, in off peak there are plenty of available units.
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3-car services in off-peak are generally sufficient anyway. The reason they largely aren’t operated is due to the time in coupling/decoupling them.
Even in peak, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Doomben train anywhere near the capacity of a 3-car unit. Maybe on race days.
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We have a good working relationship with ABC Brisbane, definitely keen to talk to BT more as well. Unfortunately we don’t really have much on the influencer front - immyonboard is active on the forum but largely posts under her own personal name or as part of SEQTA. I’ve been personally trying to produce BTQ socials content, but unfortunately a 9-5 job + other advocacy work has meant I’ve been working slower than I’d like on it
I echo the same concern. Especially looking at the service levels of bus and train services in Redlands, Logan, Ipswich and Moreton. If it was taken away from BCC, I fear they’ll hand much of the network over to private operators and then set up a bunch of really complex contracts and that service levels would decline. But regardless, I don’t actually know, maybe with a good vision and good leadership, we could get much better outcomes.
With that said, centralised transport planning does make a lot of sense, I’m just not sure I trust our institutions to do a good job (yet).
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Which operator?
New bus, and I’m betting it’s Mt Gravatt.
Was the 262 so I believe Mt Gravatt
Just realized that the ‘high frequency map’ by Translink was updated months ago, to include routes 125, 175, 185, and 204! Now the map looks so cluttered hahaha.
However, they need to update it with routes 139, 169, 209, 338, 348, 375, and 390 - which themselves are high frequency as well.
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The 139, 209 don’t even run on the weekends at all. The others you’ve listed might be high frequency between 7-7 weekdays but only run every 30 minutes at other times. In some cases hourly. You can’t be putting a route on a map calling it high frequency when theres a chance someone reading it might not be able to catch it for 59 minutes
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Wow - I could see the sparks coming from my brain as it was frying just looking at that diagram…
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It’s too cramped, for starters. Some of that’s a result of showing routes which should not be considered “frequent”, since they don’t run frequently the whole time, and have inadequate Sunday operating hours. The bare minimum of “frequent service” should be every 15 min (at worst), 6 am to 10 pm daily.
[Edited to add:] They don’t seem to understand the concept of making the central area larger, since there’s a lot more information to depict there (à la the London Tube Map, but also done quite successfully with Jug Cerovic’s Utrecht map, for instance).
No the 209 does operate on weekends, but only hourly, I know because I sometimes go to study at the UQ library on weekends.
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No bus service coming to Macleay Island
