Hi, a few months ago I took a trip as a tourist without a car to Warwick and Stanthorpe and while I really enjoyed it, especially when I took the southern downs heritage railway between Warwick and Stanthorpe. I noticed what seems to be some serious deficiencies in public transport provision in the region. Besides the Urban service in Warwick which does not operate on Sunday, the main provider of public bus services is Crisps Coaches who do at least 1 run between Brisbane and Stanthorpe via Cunningham’s gap and Warwick mondays-fridays, with two runs on monday and friday respectively. From what I understand they used to go over the border and have weekend services but not in a while, to me its seems that its unreasonable for it not to go that far despite the social and economic ties between both sides of the state border in those regions, if anyone has more experience with how bus services came to end up like this and how they were previously I would like to hear. I have attached the timetables for the service in both directions from the website of Crisp’s Coaches.
Welcome @as-saffarini!
I had no idea there was a bus from PA Hospital to Stanthorpe. Are these Translink services or TMR subsidised services, or are they a purely commercial operator?
I believe its a purely commercial operator, when I took them from brisbane they went via the legacy tollway, definitely did not pass anywhere near PA hospital it says on request but did not bother asking anyone about it.
Thanks for the info. Had a quick look at it and didn’t know about the routes - they seem to have a few.
Unlike other states such as NSW, VIC, WA etc, rural and regional bus services are just left to commercial operators to do whatever it seems.
When the mail trains ended in the 70s (Warwick/Stanthorpe/Tenterfield/Sydney) and 90s (Warwick/Goondiwindi/Dirranbandi), they were effectively replaced with nothing from a government perspective. Private operators out here in Southern QLD do not make big money on these routes, but they do often pick up government contracts for school bus services. Stanthorpe-Warwick-Toowoomba goes ok, hence the service on more days.
We are lucky in Warwick to have a local ‘translink’ bus service at all, to be honest. We’re only a town/city of ~15,000. Stanthorpe, Goondiwindi and other communities have essentially nothing for local travel - it’s use a taxi or drop a few dollars on the pokies at the pub and ask to use the complementary shuttle bus 
.
We can, of course, do better. There is a community of hybrid workers here who maintain an office in the city, and we are forced to either drive to the city or an intermediate station (Springfield is the best for this purpose). A once or twice daily (in each direction) subsidised bus from the city, Ipswich or Springfield wouldn’t go astray, and it’s a hell of a lot more service than we get presently.
As for more connections into NSW (i.e. Tenterfield), I would think neither state government would be interested in chipping in because a portion of those funds could in theory have a benefit to the other state. But sometimes I think it would be nice to have a connection from Tenterfield to Brisbane that meets the NSW Trainlink bus from Armidale. The timings are a bit inconvenient through for through service (if memory serves, the bus FROM Armidale gets to Tenterfield after 8pm and the the bus TO Armidale leaves Tenterfield at like 5am… You can see what that means for approx Brisbane times).