The Northern Busway has officially opened and has revealed both impressive and dissapointing aspects about the overall project. The busway consists of three new stations and cost $444 million.
The most impressive thing about the Busway are the actual Busway Stations, with Lutwyche in particular being the stand out station. Lutwyche station consists of four lift cores and stair wells making the station easily one of the most accessable in the network. It is located underground between two tunnel entrances.
Station signage and design follows the typical Translink livery and branding which still retains its modern glass feeling and style. Journey times will also be dramatically cut, with buses skipping up to 7 sets of traffic lights.
The most disappointing aspect of the project is the missing link between Turo Street Station and the RBWH station. From the RBWH station, buses are forced back onto Lutwyche Road to sit idle with traffic for about two kilometres until buses re-enter the busway at Turo Street Station.
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This could easily be solved by the introduction of bus lanes on Lutwyche road, however this was not part of the overall plan and the current LNP government has no intention of creating new bus lanes. Its suffice to say that this blunder is quite possibly the single most ridiculous shortfall of a project of this size and despite the massive benefits a bus lane would have to public transport for the northern suburbs, motorists would be up in arms about loosing a traffic lane to public transit.
Despite this, the project is well needed and will signify the start of enhanced public transport for the northern suburbs.
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No bus lanes! What a scandal!
I don’t care how beautiful your Bus Station is, Please give us the bus lane!
Who designed this project!
How stupid is the new northern busway? You to wait up to 2 minutes to get out onto Gympie Road at Sadlier Street – even when there is no traffic heading north. And how long does the light changing sequence have to be for Sadlier Street – a nothing street of any description? Stupid stupid stupid.
Give the buses priority for exiting onto Gympie Road please.
Ever since when the Northern Busway opened to the public, I have noticed that I travelled to Kedron, and back to City a lot much faster than trains. Before the opening of a new Northern Busway, I’d catch 66 from Roma Street to RBWH using the old Inner Northern Busway, and another bus to Kedron (or sometimes caught 333 straight up). It would take me around 20 to 30 minutes.
But now with the new Northern Busway, it would actually take me ten minutes minimum directly from Roma Street to Kedron Brook. But what gobsmackes me the most is the fact that buses are faster than trains. I’ll explain this one:
Normally I’d catch 7:37am Airport train at Roma, and arrive Eagle Junction sometime at 7:55am and walk to Kedron, and I would arrive there at around 8:15am. That’s the train. Now let’s compare it with bus on the new busway; I’d catch 7:55am 333 (or 340) also from Roma, and arriving at Kedron Brook at sometime between 8:05 to 8:10.
I was so shocked and since then I catch bus more frequently than trains. Let’s imagine this if the Northern Busway was redeveloped with a full underground tunnel completely all the way from RBWH to Tuoro Street! With two new underground busway station (that is just like King George Square Station) located under Windsor Railway Station all the way to the main bus station at Windsor, near the Officeworks and front of the state school, around that big hill – you guys know? And then from that also directly underground to Lutwyche. I think it is actually simple as that! With this, I’d get to Kedron even faster and I will be happy to fork out expensive fares from Translink just for this!
Well a tunnel to Windsor WOULD be nice (thus alleviating up to two minutes to get onto Lutwyche Road at the Shell Servo), but it still doesn’t resolve my grizzle of why does it take up to two teeth-grinding minutes to get out onto Gympie Road at Sadlier Street???
Not to mention the number of changes of lights that have to be missed to turn right into Hamilton Road (for Chermside interchange). Can the powers that be consider the following:
Bus for Chermside should turn right into Hamilton from the LEFT hand side of Gympie Roadby using a priority bus lane and a priority Bus Only right turn only light.
You Brisbane people are lucky to have such well developed infrastructure. I come from Perth, and even though we are only about 200 000 people smaller than Brisbane, the difference is astonishing. In Brisbane, all train lines have 6 carriage trains while in Perth only two of our lines do and the rest have four carriage trains which are so overcrowded people are unable to get on. Also, we only have 5 lines and one spur, so our network is poorly developed. We dont have a train line to the airport. We dont have busways. We dont have light rail. We dont have ferries. We dont have most of the stuff Brisbane has, so think before you complain. This is coming from someone in PERTH where its taken 60 years to introduce Sunday trading.
Weezel, if you think Brisbane people like to complain about Public Transport, take a trip to Sydney! That is a city with a PT complaints culture!
Try public transportation in Auckland, They still haven’t electrified the trains – in progress, incomplete, no underground rail loop in the CBD. There is only one busway to the north shore (incomplete) the rest of the routes use at grade bus lanes, where the buses still have to stop at most lights. Motorways still incomplete and frequently jammed. This is for a city of 1.5 million Brisbane infrastructure is twice as good and effective.