What is happening to the Toombul bus interchange?
The Toombul bus interchange is an important part of the local public transport network and to the functionality of the site. The proposal is being developed with consideration of how public transport continues to operate in the area, including the role of the bus interchange. Discussions with relevant stakeholders, including transport authorities, will inform how the interchange is integrated into the future precinct.
The connectivity between the train station, bus interchange, and whatever is built at Toombul needs a serious upgrade. An elevated pedestrian crossing of Sandgate Road would be the first place to start.
Elevated pedestrian crossings are barriers to movement and are always unsuccessful at moving people. It would be better just to expand and improve the pedestrian crossing and make it very accessible. Sandgate Road should not be a freeway anyway.
Even better, now that the shopping centre is gone, why not go to modern best practice and go to an inline station on the same side as the station. It would require a new set of traffic lights and losing the park and ride, but would speed up buses a lot and provide much better bus/rail connection. Something like:
^^ Would a format like that have the capacity to handle the amount of buses that use Toombul? The current station does have 6 platforms and, going by the translink site right now, can see 3 buses arriving at the exact same time.
Parkland Street is incredibly narrow and busy. Iâm not sure buses could make that round about either as drivers sometimes struggle in their cars.
Toombul Interchange also has a number of bus parking bays.
You might need to do some minor road reconfiguration.
My thinking is you would have bus standing somewhere else, but mostly you would reconfigure the routes so that very few buses started or finished their route at Toombul. You might fit in room for two buses at the platform, which should be enough to handle 20-30 buses per hour per direction pretty comfortably.
An inline station has merit and should be investigated. The shops backing onto the rail line would be removed to create space for the interchange.
I would support a pedestrian overpass similar to that for Yeerongpilly station. Safety comes first, and given the high volume of people, an overpass is appropriate.
Safety is achieved by slowing down traffic and providing priority to vulnerable road users. If a street is unsafe to cross, there is an issue with the street. That wonât be fixed by an overpass.
Grade-separated crossings are not really a safety feature. They are better viewed as an expensive piece of infrastructure to ensure drivers arenât inconvenienced by pedestrians.
The only place where flyovers/tunnels really should exist is to enable crossing of limited access freeway/motorway/train line-type infrastructure. Not a stroad in an urban environment.
Thereâs more than 1 way to achieve safety, and separation is one of those options.
As much as I agree that the ideal is for traffic to stop for pedestrians or be re-routed. They arenât going to lower Sandgate road and I would massively prefer a shaded overpass to crossing the road at grade.
If we had a government and city council designing for pedestrians sure we can reject over and underpasses but I think that using them could improve some of Brisbaneâs awful pedestrian crossings.
Spot On. Australian cities are well overdue for this. The days of owning a house on a quarter acre block are outdated. We need more medium density housing, family friendly apartments and more walkable communities. We need to end our unhealthy obsession with owning a plot of land and instead prioritise housing as a service, as essential infrastructure. Access to Shelter is a human right. You shouldnât have to own a home to be guaranteed stability.
Higher density is a more efficient way of living. And removing the backyard (or lack thereof in newer estates) can allow for the creation of communal greenspace where community can actually thrive and be social. The future is coming and suburban sprawl should be put in its rightful place, the past.
Carindale will look exactly like this in a couple of years if all goes well: a âmini Parramattaâ with its planned 30-storey skyline, higher than Indooroopillyâs 20-25 story height limit, and certainly more than Nundahâs 15 stories.
The only difference is that Carindale doesnât have heavy rail unfortunately. But I believe Carindale is still close enough to the City (11km east), that itâll encourage people to partake in active travel. The existing Bulimba Creek bikeway in Carindale is pretty extensive as well, stretching from Murrarie (north) to Eight Mile Plains (south).
Also difference in my view is unlike current conditions where ownership takes centre stage, given how far out of reach homeownership is particularly for young people, and also with how exploitative the rental market is, in my ideal system, the housing would be owned by either the government, some authority or collectively by the community under some kind of flexible housing as a service model.
Access to shelter is a fundamental human right.
My other half and I resigned ourselves to the fact that even as relatively well paid office drones, we were never going to achieve the quarter acre block âdreamâ in Brisbane, so we settled for medium density on the Sunshine Coast within walking distance to a train station and itâs probably the smartest financial decision weâve made.
1h15m trip into Central (pre B2N and CRR, should shave off another 5 mins at least), 20 mins to the beach, and our floor space is similar to that of a house because our townhouse is two storeys. No backyard but who cares?
We saved probably $500k compared to the equivalent in the outer burbs of Brisbane, where weâd still have to drive to a bus stop or train station and ultimately would only save maybe 10-15 minutes on the commute.
âValue Captureâ, is something generally done rather poorly when promoting heavy rail projects [right across the spectrum] in this part of the world!
Whatâs even crazier is that both Caboolture and Wallan are both roughly 45km north from their respective CBDs (Caboolture from Brisbane & Wallan from Melbourne respectively).
Caboolture station is the terminus of the Caboolture line/also served by Sunshine Coast line, whilst Wallan is served by V/line Seymour & Shepparton services (though plans do exist to extend the Metro Cragieburn line there eventually).
Both have similar amount of services etc, Caboolture is a bit more maturely developed though.
I would be paying $400,000 more for same sized 3 bedroom house on a 600sqm lot in Caboolture compared to if I just moved to Wallan.
Now letâs compare apartments. In St Kilda, a 10 minute tram ride from Melbournes CBD, I could get a decent 2 bed apartment with a balcony, well served by public transport especially Trams and Buses, for under $500k. Now if I was to buy a 2 bedder apartment in Coorparoo, about the same distance out from our CBD, I would need over $775k. Keep in mind this particular one also has no balconies, is actually smaller in total area and itâs in a flood zone.
Just shows how cooked our housing market is
Agreed, and itâs even more puzzling as to why different sources of funding are not at least contributing a minor about (rather than nothing) given that Australian infrastructure per-km costs are some of the highest in the world.