Brisbane To Struggle Without Rail Investment

I am from Brisbane and currently on holiday in Europe. Every city I have been to has made the right decision with their public transport options. Berlin for example has excellent rail infrastructure, trams, underground metro and above ground S trains. Always very quick and efficient.

Why is it we still have to deal with road congestion in Brisbane when we could take some advice from the great cities of the world?

I cannot believe fools like Campbell Newman continue to spend billions of our money on these unused tunnels and bridges. It infuriates me like nothing else.

Queensland politicans are short on vision so don’t hold your breath about a decent rail network or tram system any time soon.

Campbell loves his tunnels and Brisbanites love their car.

I recently returned from Sydney and wow what a world class transport system that is. I ran some numbers and their 8 car trains seat 940 people where as our 6 car trains only seat 496. If we widened the central tunnels OR put in a metro system and had main train stations outside of central we could run standard gauge and run sydney trains. These things are truly amazing. The entire system runs like clockwork, in pouring rain in peak hour with flash flooding everywhere (thursday) I caught a bus that was only 2 minutes delayed. It also was not packed. I believe trains are they key, more people on rail = less people on bus and the roads allowing roads to be upgraded where required creating less impact.
Imagine 1000 people every 2minutes moving in and out of the CBD on 5 main lines and another 98 people per bus it would be heaven. Add to that an underground light rail (kelvin grove, paddington, milton, highgate hill, east brisbane, balmoral, newstead, the vally etc) we would be good for another 50 years but only pay 2012 prices on construction costs instead of 2026 costs (easily 3-4x the price of today) Yes it WILL cost billions but its going to cost many more billions if we sit on our hands waiting. Its also not like it wont be paid back. I drive everywhere and I hate it but I hate long train trips sardined in more. I would quite happily pay for a ticket if I could get to work within a reasonable time and not have to walk 5 kilometers each day. More seating density could allow cheaper prices making the service open to even more people. I pay around $80 a week to transport my self and my wife to work from North Brisbane. My current transport trip takes 50minutes + 2k walking time and costs $9.54. It takes me most days 45minutes to drive.

The crux of the issue is that Brisbane needs to shift it’s reliance on cars and buses and implement a high frequency, reliable and effective rail system. This is especially true for areas within at least 5km of the CBD. Convert the busways to light rail and convert the stations into hubs. Keep the buses to deliver people to these hubs, instead of having them congest inner-city roads.

Living in the Eastern Suburbs all my life, I’ve seen the transition from an effective system, to one that is fracturing and crumbling under soaring population growth, incompetent planning and poorly implemented infrastructure and ideas.

Sadly, all roads lead to the city. And the shear amount of bottlenecks that exist on Brisbane’s roads is unfathomable. Need I even mention the Stanley St / Riverside Expressway merger? Four lanes of heavy traffic forced to merge into one over a distance of less than 50m.

Yes, and its not going to get better in the near future I’m afraid.
Our adversairial political processis bunkum. No one wins…

http://m.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/crossriver-rail-wont–happen-newman-20111206-1oh0g.html

I feel Brisbane is so far behind in what we could be doing to maximise usage and make the impact on the city and streets minimal.
The SE busways work fantastic, it only takes me 15mins to get to work which is amazing – im very lucky my bus route doesnt have to sit in traffic. But the cultural centre station is a big problem – there are so many buses and it gets so conjested, there has to be another solution to clear that area? RE: Trains – the trains are also far too infrequent. go overseas to move cities in north america and europe and their subway or light rail systems see trains coming every couple of minutes (rather than every 15-20mins). I know we have a completely different system but lets get rid of it, upgrade it to something more modern and reliable – a subway or a skytrain, underground/aboveground – something to help move ppl around and get traffic off the streets.

Hi there,

Brisbane’s busways work really well. The main issue with Cultural Centre is that it is class B right of way (that is, it shares intersections with car traffic). This means that Cultural Centre is at capacity at 180 buses/hour, or 9000 passengers/direction/hour.

If that were to be upgraded to a class A right of way, you could potentially get 12 000 – 18 000 pphd, a doubling of capacity. This however would require a tunnel under the CBD to do and a number of bus stations which would be a few billion dollars.

In terms of rail investment, Cross River Rail is the first priority as this will allow the rest of the network to be converted over to high frequency operation and act like a metro. Brisbane has 85 train stations within the Brisbane City Council Boundaries, which is more train stations than Toronto!

The South East Busway should not be upgraded to Light Rail, as this would only add a maximum of ~ 5000 pphd. A metro service down the busway would be able to increase that to 30 000 – 40 000 pphd, an effective doubling of capacity.

In terms of what can be done today- more bus lanes are required (coronation drive) and a roll out of further BUZ routes to make a basic frequent network.

I apologise for my blog being on hiatus, it will return mid 2012.

I heard at one stage that the bcc were thinking about putting a subway in which is an excelent idea.

I think this article raises some very important issues given Brisbane’s recent and continued population growth. I also believe that the authorities need to have greater foresight in the construction and implementation of transportation infrastructure for both mass transit and cars.
I might be alone in my belief that the last thing Brisbane really needs is another footbridge, and am I the only one that thinks building a $380 million (Go-Between) toll bridge less than a 100 metres away from a free bridge going to pretty much exactly the same place is just a little absurd. What I also can’t believe is the resistance of authorities to open up the Green Bridge at St. Lucia or at the very least build another bridge in close proximity going to the Dutton Park/West End area in order to ease congestion on Coronation Drive.
I also believe that as Brisbane is becoming a world city it would be incredibly beneficial to have a subway system in a general 10 – 20km radius of the CBD.
It doesn’t seem like rocket science to me, but then again i’m not a town planner. I wouldn’t mind someone explaining to me why these common sense solutions have not/cannot be implemented.

Hi, Brisbane Developments i don’t know if it’s in your duty to get a petition out on the light rail in brisbane going. i think the momentum of growing support in the last couple yrs has grown for some sort of light rail system in Brisbane so please hit the streets and get signatures and consider myself to be a volunteer…i guess its a start.