I was looking at the timetable for routes 215 & 220 this morning, and it struck me that the common section (Tingalpa to the city) does not have equal spacing.
e.g. on Saturdays, the 220 inbound departs Tingalpa at :21 and the 215 at :00. Both routes are hourly.
Sundays are similar, but the departure times are slightly different, the 220 departing Tingalpa at :20 and the 215 at :59.
The outbound routes have similar odd spacing, departing the City on Saturdays at :35 (220) and :02 (215), and on Sundays at :35 (220) and :57 (215). Weekdays off-peak displays a similar lack of consistency.
Can anyone explain why these routes aren’t aligned to operate every 30 minutes between Tingalpa and the City? It would seem logical to me, but here we are.
There’s also the question of why both these routes don’t operate every 30 minutes, with 15 minute frequency through the combined section, but I guess that’s a different topic.
I used to live where my two buses were the 454 and the 460 and after 7PM they were both hourly and ran five minutes apart, even though they had a common first half of the route. It was infuriating and so wasteful. Fixing these seem like such low hanging almost zero cost fruit.
I was out taking some pics this afternoon of some of the bus routes that will be changing and noticed the 338 (ex 370) and 348 (ex 375) will run outbound about a minute or two apart during the weekday off peak.
Oh yeah I should mention: I have Theory about this.
(Basically you assume passengers arrive uniformly & catch the first service available, then integrate to get the evenly-spaced frequency with equivalent average wait times.)
Wynnum road bus services are a mess. It shouldn’t be too kuch to expect such a major road through so much density and major destinations (employment, education, shopping, leisure) would have a legible, frequent bus service (or coordinated set of services)
I do find that with the Mains Rd corridor in Sunnybank Hills & Sunnybank, the 130 & 140 are often spaced apart usually 1-3 minutes apart. Again, I’d prefer if they were timetabled 7.5 minutes apart from each other, considering they are BUZs’.
I think part of the issue with the 130/140 spacing is that the 130 actually runs more frequently than every 15 minutes for large portions of the day.
In the Inbound direction, the 130 runs at a consistent 10 minute intervals from 4:55am right through to 11:16am (this is excluding the additional short runners added between 6:59am and 8:30am). While Outbound has 10 minute frequencies that effectively start from 2:10pm, jumping to every ~7-8 minutes between 3:10pm and 6:10pm, then back to 10 minutes until 9:10pm!
While the 140 also goes to 10 minutes (+ short starters) during peak, it doesn’t extend through the day like the 130. 140 goes to 10mins between 6:42am - 8:02am in the AM, and 2:42pm - 6:02pm (and ~7-8 minutes between 3:34pm - 5:52pm) in the PM. Outside of this, it is strictly 15 minute intervals.
I logged on this morning to post about this exact issue, applying to the Ekibin Road East segment of the 112, 113 and 116 routes.
These routes have been changed a lot with the new network, including some small improvements to the span of hours, some route path change, but also some truncations which many people are still getting used to.
One of the minor benefits has been consolidating all three routes on Ekibin Road East as it runs down towards Arnwood Place. This is a previously quite underserved corner of Tarragindi and southern Annerley which is beyond a comfortable walking distance from both Ipswich Road and from the busway, especially in summer.
Unfortunately, the benefit of that consolidation on Ekibin Road East is almost totally squandered by the fact that all three services come within 10 minutes of each other bunched around :30, every hour from 10am onwards. This is true for all inbound services after the morning, peak and for all inbound services on Saturdays and Sundays (such as exist).
I am a little bit skeptical that these kind of issues can ever be satisfactory and resolved while maintaining different route numbers, rather than consolidating, smaller roots into more legible and predictable high frequency ones, but it is very frustrating as a commuter to see this wasted opportunity.
Seems the problem mail occurs heading inbound if I’m not mistaken? I wonder if the lengths of the routes lead to a timetable that has forced bunching for some reason? I hope Brisbane can fix these timetabling issues sometime soon ideally
There is a timetable skew on the inner-city subs sector in our rail network between Boggo Road and Bowen Hills.
The northbound City & Shorncliffe/Northgate trains arrives a 1.5 min after the City & Ferny Grove train both during peak and off-peak hour, meaning City & Shorncliffe/Northgate trains would have to travel at a slow crawl from Boggo Road to Roma Street (City & Shorncliffe/Northgate train travels at almost regular from Roma Street to Bowen Hills). Meanwhile, I often observed the City & Beenleigh/Coopers Plains trains stopped on the flying junction at Mayne Yard waiting for the CIty & Cleveland/Cannon Hill to pass Bowen Hills.
I know this weird timetabling is caused by constraints for running the Gold Coast/Airport trains (two/tri track from Boggo Road - Beenleigh and flat junction after Eagle Junction), but it’s a major pet peeve I have when taking the train to and from South Bank.
I have asked my local Councillor to raise this with the council bus planning team, but when I went to submit the same request to Translink, I found there was no way to send them anything in writing over 800 characters and length.
I asked the online chat team, but they are only suggestion was to call and Lodge the suggestion over the phone, which is obviously impractical and a bit silly.
Email feedback for a request submitted via their online team came via [email protected]
My reply to that was responded to as well, so it is monitored.
Worth a try!
TransLink’s overly structured feedback form drives me nuts. I typically just FB Messenger them and get them to submit a request.
They’ve also asked me before to email that address to add photos to a request. So you might be able to get the chat team to start the request and then you add to it via email?
I’ve placed feedback via Facebook Messenger in the past, but the last couple of times I’ve tried that (both this year), they’ve asked me to use the feedback form, or call.
For sure! It frustrates me to no end that the character restriction is so small and they provide no public facing email address . Almost like they want to discourage people from making complaints…
I mean, you can also spam via a form. It’s not like they are immune from the issue. You can mitigate it by adding a captcha to the contact page if it truly is an issue.
If the form actually had a reasonable character cap though, it wouldn’t even be an issue. However, if they insist on the character cap, then they must provide a way for people to send through more substantial comments which doesn’t require you to call up and waste both your time and the operators time on the phone for what really could just be an email.
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