I don’t want to stigmatise anyone here but lately I have been taking the trains late a night (often filming or just wandering the network) and it’s come to my attention that despite the network being mostly quiet at night, nearly every time I have encounter a few, let’s just say, interesting characters using the system. I don’t know if this is just coincidence or do we actually have a lot of crackheads and undesirables on Public Transport at night?. Also worth noting most of the time it wasn’t on the train but rather at the stations where a lot of the dodgy stuff was happening. I think at some stations, a boosted police presence is badly needed as better lighting on platforms.
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Whereabouts around the network? 
Were you loitering around Zillmere station? Well, that’s to be expected 
Usually, there’ll be some delinquents zooming across the Zillmere station footbridge or at the adjacent Handford Rd on their modified e-scooters.
Interestingly, I find that most of the stations (if not all) along the Springfield and Ipswich lines are very quiet and dead at night.
I think every city has issues with residents who are either drug-affected or have visible mental health issues.
These people, and others who may practice antisocial behavours on public transport, can probably be found on the network all day long but during the day they are probably less visible due to the larger amounts of people in general who are on these services.
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Bald Hills Actually, which is my local stop as well but yea heard Zilmere is much worse. So too is Strathpine. I don’t know what the Southside stations are like aside from occasional news posts.
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This is a problem that will only get worse as the housing affordability crisis worsens.
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Well yeh. We need cheaper housing and more dense. Also we need more family apartments (aka ones with 3 beds). Forget about a backyard people just need somewhere to live and raise families and they can’t afford a 4 bed house on quarter acre block, nor can they raise a family in a 1 bed joke of a studio unit.
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Drug use is just a symptom. The underlying issue is that Brisbane has a poverty, homelessness and mental illness problem. If those problems aren’t addressed, the people who suffer from them will congregate on or around public transport, because it’s one of the few places in society they’re usually allowed to exist without getting moved on by security or police.
If the public actually want this fixed, the government can either comprehensively address those underlying issues, or they can just do what the rest of society does, and add more security guards to harass the homeless and mentally ill until they go somewhere else. But one day I reckon they’ll run out of other places to go.
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Or local councils can take the extra added-value option, make being homeless and camping on public premises and facilities illegal, seize and destroy their limited possessions and try to make them move on to some other LGA that hasn’t imposed such laws (yet) 
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We need social housing. A lot more of it
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We do. Although I think even social housing isn’t enough by itself. For a start, public housing seems better, because it’s cheaper for the end user, and social housing can be run by groups like the Salvation Army who might (officially or not) impose their particular moral values on tenants. But more broadly, while being housed solves a lot of issues, we all know that housing alone doesn’t solve mental illness or substance abuse.
It’s easy to think of public transport as being its own issue, separate to other issues society faces, but it’s actually intertwined with those other issues because we all share the same society. And public transport has few barriers on its use, compared to private transport, so it can’t always be insulated from other issues.
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