I spoke to Paul Lucas forever ago and the SEB was always considered as a future light rail corridor to improve capacity and absolutely never considered heavy rail.
The metro as the tech utilised now, is more or less accounting for that additional capacity that light rail would achieve (and achieve more) with less of the cost. But if the Metro ever expands and we have a northern extension and south-west extension, you would have to seriously consider light rail at that time given how good the Sydney Metro is.
Regardless of the extensions (if they eventuate, or are funded) will miss the main point that it does not address - population growth and PT demand by 2032.
Adding 60 bi-arts was last decadeâs solution. Are bus extensions the solution or the problem?
I disagree. I believe it should have been heavy rail or metro from the start, purely from a capacity perspective. I know using rail would have required a new tunnel like cross river rail anyhow, but this infrastructure was needed either way. Regarding the urban sprawl thing, this is more a reflection on poor urban planning rather than the issue of rail or bus. The SEB is trying to be used like a rail line in the meantime and even has feeder services feeding into the busway. It should have been built with 9 car capacity from day 1. The thing I would have done differently from the beginning was to tunnel from Upper Mount Gravatt down the Logan Road corridor so that suburbs in this area could be served be high capacity transport, and perhaps the current SEB corridor being used by Gold Coast services.
But, regardless of my opinion, this wonât happen now because financially and logistically this wonât be possible anymore.
I would argue that the SEB doesnât operate like a rail line at all for the simple fact that the vast majority of its bus routes and the passengers on those routes do not run along the busway from end to end, but instead use only certain portions on the busway to travel further afield.
You have the AM peak services that exit the busway at Woolloongabba to utilise the Captain Cook Bridge and CBD streets, the buses that continue eastwards after Woolloongabba or Langlands Park, the 130/140 & 150 that get off after Griffith Uni/UMG to go out to Browns Plains, or all the peak routes that spreadout in all directions after Springwood, to cover much of Logan.
Isnât that model going to be changing as more and more Metro buses are added (eventually, as capacity is added) and they become a bigger % of the traffic along the busway?
Not really, as the Metros will either be replacing the minority of bus routes that already resemble a train service (eg. 555), or will still resemble a service that only uses part of the Busway before continuing further afield (eg. Capalaba Metro). There will likely be some level of feederisation associated with these additions, but it wonât do anything to change the use of portions of the busway by the 130/140/150, etc.
Thatâs fine if you disagree, but my position remains the same. I find it odd to say that areas along the busway do not have the density to support heavy rail, considering the area around Upper Mt Gravatt has multiple tall apartment buildings, and every single one of our rail lines goes through areas with far lower density and activity than the South East Busway.
Perth has shown how heavy rail can work well alongside highways. I think they made a much smarter decision to build heavy rail rather than busways in these corridors, because it has successfully changed the mentality of the people to be willing to catch buses to their local station and transfer to a train to travel further.
By contrast Iâd say busways have been counterproductive for persuading people to transfer. Prior to last year, there were a lot of routes that did a winding, indirect component through the suburbs, plus a direct, express component via the busway. These services gave people the expectation of having a single seat journey from a stop near their home to the city, which creates an inefficient system and rapidly led to the busway approaching its maximum capacity and being congested at peak hour.
Theyâve tried to unscramble that egg with the introduction of the âMetroâ and associated route reform last year. But thatâs generated a lot of complaints from the public, which wouldnât have happened if people always had the expectation of transferring from a lower capacity vehicle to a higher capacity vehicle. And their ability to shorten suburban routes and get people to transfer to the âMetroâ is limited by the capacity of the âMetroâ vehicles, which are far lower than for heavy rail.
I think itâs also strange to suggest that a train line within the existing built-up urban area encourages sprawl, when usually itâs the desire of people to drive and live in freestanding homes that causes that. This would be the case regardless of what specific mode the SEB had used, but Iâd argue that the ability to cope with higher passenger loads from increased development around stations will always be greater for heavy rail than for buses, because of the higher vehicle capacity.
You say the SEB has been the most successful public transport project in Brisbane. Iâd agree, but Iâd say itâs become far too successful, hitting its maximum capacity within 20 years of opening. This wouldnât have happened had it used heavy rail from the outset.
Indeed it was never considered for heavy rail. We have a problem to this day with bus routes being designed to compete with trains rather than feeding into them. This mentality was probably even greater back in the 1990s, when Queensland Rail and Queensland Transport couldnât cooperate even to establish an integrated ticketing program, let alone work together on project conception and design.
Some years back Professor Matt Burke of Griffith University (and now Bicycle Queensland CEO) co-authored a paper on how the busways came to be. His findings were that the busways were essentially pushed by BCC, who had no interest whatsoever in working with the rail system.
Cr Hayes, seemingly impressed by what the delegation saw in Ottawa, commissioned the mostly engineering consultants McCormick Rankin to produce a preliminary report on the concept in 1995 (McCormick Rankin 1995). This mainly conceptual infrastructure-based plan proposed busway corridors running north, south, east, and west of Brisbaneâs city centre, as shown in Figure 3.
Reviewing the report one finds few figures, negligible evaluation and very little technical analysis. The rail network is almost completely ignored, and especially options to encourage interchange.
Then when it came to Queensland Transport creating their Integrated Regional Transport Plan (IRTP), at the time they didnât do rail planning, and as I stated earlier, they didnât work well with QR back then. They seemed to share BCCs mentality of the bus network being entirely separate to rail, instead of being forward-thinking enough to encourage transfers and buses feeding into railway stations.
The inclusion of busways, to such a degree, in part relates to problems of rail planning and management at the time perceived by the interviewees, and either the lack of capacity or willingness of Queensland Rail to be proactive. The âreason Busways were in the plan was because we couldnât do any rail planningâ and that âNo one except the planning team was behind it (improving rail)â (SGE1).
Only cursory analysis of an LRT option for the corridor was considered, but dismissed relatively quickly, one interviewee noting that âat the end of the day, it was determined to be very costly and disruptive to traffic where it would run at grade on the existing roadwaysâ (PC3, 2013). LRT would also have required passengers to interchange, which was broadly seen as undesirable and not part of the local public transport culture at that time.
Only by the 2000s did Queensland Transport and QR start to play ball, and accept the idea of an integrated network with transferring. But by then we already had the SEB. And so weâre going to be stuck with capacity constraints for a very long time. Maybe a good first step to a better system is finally getting rid of the mentality that buses should compete with trains for CBD travel, at least wherever there isnât a busway.
It doesnât, but imagine if it was originally built as heavy rail.
Mains Rd buses would terminate at Griffith University. Buses from Logan would terminate at Eight Mile Plains (this is before the Rochedale & Springwood extensions; now most terminate would at Springwood or Rochedale).
This would mean a lot more buses/drivers could be dedicated to e.g. buses between Hyperdome and Springwood, or from Browns Plains to Griffith University.
Alas, it wasnât built that way, but it wouldâve been a game changer now if it had been. Probably wouldâve meant we got CRR a decade or more earlier, too.
To me the development of those areas adjacent to the busway has more to do with zoning laws being relaxed to allow more density, which has not really happened with any of the railway lines within Brisbane. I think that a comprehensive rezoning including densification around train stations on the Beenleigh line would be more effective at mode shifting and reorienting to public transport on the south side of Brisbane because those urban areas donât have giant motorways cutting through them that canât realistically be removed like the pacific motorway.
When it comes to transferring, the issue I think has been a lack of strategy, it made sense at the start to structure the busway around limiting passenger transfers but BCC should have had a strategy to gradually move to increasing transfers. BCC suddenly doing it now in one big go was always going to elicit more backlash and even then the vast majority of people have gotten use to it by now, I am sure that when Perth went ahead with doing this there were people who complained about transfers but that did not stop their plans from going forward.
To me if you actually want to reorient Brisbane around public transport focusing on the already present but underutilised heavy rail with an upzoning strategy would be more effective than building more heavy rail to service the already present sprawl without rezoning. The SEB has definitely elicited mode shift and densification and would probably have been more successful as heavy rail but I believe that because of the pacific motorway I think that it would hit a limit much sooner than a strategy of redevelopment and service upgrades around already present train stations on the Beenleigh line.
It sounds good in theory - however, I have reservations as to just how successful it would have been in reality.
For example, considering that the majority of our rail lines STILL operate at an off peak frequency of 30 minutes, I canât see how a heavy rail SEB equivalent would have provided anywhere near the kind of service frequencies we enjoy on much of busway today. And I canât see how it would have accelerated the arrival of Cross River Rail - we still would have had the changes of Government with different funding priorities. That, together with the amount of money poured into a SEB Rail Line likely would have seen CRR pushed back to a timeline pretty well the same as today.
The hulking great shopping centre at Upper Mt Gravatt probably also has something to do with it. Note that Upper Mt Gravatt is next to a motorway yet this hasnât precluded denser development. I might add the same for Buranda.
Your argument is essentially about zoning, which I donât disagree with, but it doesnât address my main point, which is that the passenger capacity and throughput of heavy rail is unrivalled, and reaches capacity far more slowly than a busway does. When it comes to somewhere as heavily patronised as Upper Mt Gravatt, itâs clear to me that we built in the line in a mode with far too low capacity for our needs.
Iâd argue that while TMR seems to have learned a lot since the 1990s with regard to transferring and public transport modes complementing one another rather than competing, BCC has learned very little. After killing the bus reforms back in the early 2010s, they have gone for a half measure in their 2025 network because they feared the backlash from condensing more services, plus they look to have ordered too few âMetroâ vehicles for it to serve as a proper trunk line.
It would have accelerated CRR because if a South East railway line were built and connected to the Merivale Bridge, weâd have been on track to hit projected capacity on the bridge a lot sooner. It would have made the need for a second river crossing more urgent. I also imagine that Bat Tunnel would have been less likely to be proposed if there was no busway available to connect it to.
Youâre making the assumption that Qld politicians would have somehow become more public transport friendly than they ever were in reality.
If thereâs a way to cut corners, our politicians would find it. Turning Gold Coast Express services into all stoppers to increase bridge capacity, or maybe running them via Tennyson instead to use those paths for SEB. Maybe they would terminating SEB train services at South Brisbane like the old days and make people walk over the Victoria Bridge, with an eventual aboveground duplication of the Merivale Bridge instead of CRRâŚ
No, Iâm making the assumption that governments would have provided a solution because if people could no longer get a train to work, theyâd be more inclined to vote against the incumbent government. Never underestimate the factor of self interest and self preservation among politicians. When we were projected to reach Merivale Bridge capacity, CRR did get proposed. And it is getting built, just with the interlude of Newman who hated everything that wasnât a road tunnel. So itâs not like the concept of building a new rail connection was beyond our politicians.
Yes, our Government would have come up with a solution - they probably would have killed any thought of a SEB rail line, and gone with a Busway instead. Just like weâre still seeing happen to this day.
Did the previous government kill off CRR and replace it with a busway? Itâs a weird assumption to make. I feel like youâre essentially saying good things arenât possible, despite a good thing currently being delivered.
No, but the LNP Government prior to that DID cancel Cross River Rail in favour of pie in the sky alternatives like the Cleveland Solution and BAT.
The current LNP Government has killed off GCLR4 and will be replacing it with a bus-based alternative.
The current LNP Government has reduced the length of the Sunshine Coast Rail line to Birtinya, with the remainder changed to a bus-based alternative.
Had the previous Goss Labor Government proposed the SEB at a rail project, whatâs to say that the suceeding Borbidge Coalition Government, under which the SEB was approved, wouldnât have done the exact same?
The 1995 election resulted in a hung parliament, and blue team formed government afterwards with the support of an independent. Itâs entirely possible that if the Goss government had campaigned on a railway line and canned the highway through koala habitat to pay for it, they would have won the seat of Greenslopes (which in reality went to blue team by 0.11%, just 41 votes!) and consequently won the election.
Even if they didnât, the Borbidge government was following the recommendation made by Queensland Transport when they approved the busway. If a different recommendation had come out from QT, they could have followed that too.
The Borbidge government werenât adamantly opposed to rail transport like the Newman government were. They signed off on the construction of the Airtrain. Of course, they farmed it out to the private sector and gave them 35 years of exclusivity, which is screwing us immensely for the Olympics, but the fact remains they didnât torpedo the line and build it as a busway instead.