The Rosewood Gap

[mufreight]

Again Translink is telling porkies,
When the Saddliers Crossing rail bridge was being repaired and repainted there were two bus services and one rail service operated through that gap period, from personal observation the bus services carried reasonable loadings, many of these passengers were commuters who normaly would have travelled by private car.
As the buses used on these services were not equiped with Go card readers and fares were not collected there were no loading figures collected for any of the bus substitution services.
For Translink to now assert that there is no point in filling the gap in the peak hour timetable because there is or would be insufficent use of such a service is again Translink misinformation, commuters can not use a service that does not exist and the lack of a service in that gap of over 70 minutes in the peak travel period when they are returning home further deters commuters from using the rail services on their forward journey be it to Ipswich or to stations further towards Brisbane and gives them no choice but to use private cars rather than rail.
One could be easily excused of making the assumption that it is Translink management and Government policy not to provide reasonable standards of service so as to deter public transport use to justify either the lack of service or with the intention at a future time to withdraw services due to lack of patronage.

[stephenk]

One could be easily excused of making the assumption that it is Translink management and Government policy not to provide reasonable standards of service so as to deter public transport...

I think there are quite a lot of us on the forum who would agree with this part of the statement.

Generically - if they spend money and improve service, then the service it will reach capacity, and then they have to spend more money to improve the infrastructure to improve the service again. Or as they seem to be doing, just not spend anything, not improve service, and then not have to improve infrastructure further.

[#Metro]

The least that could be done is to run a bus in the gaps. That is pretty cheap thing to do and could form part of the 301 000 services we are yet to see.

I really hope that they keep good on their promise.

[mufreight]

From the loadings that were carried on the two bus and one rail service during the substitution while the bridgeworks were carried out it would require at least four bus services to provide the fill in, something that could be accomplished with the operation of one three car train which would effectively reduce the gap to a more reasonable 35 minutes and which would undoubtedly attract more patronage.
At the present time there are a number of commuters who drive into Ipswich and park then catch trains into the Brisbane CBD daily because of this gap in the evening peak services, these commuters would use rail for their full journey if services were avaliable.
The costs of providing such a service are minimal and considerably less than they would be for the bus services needed to provide the same capacity.