Well, 1.5 million per year is not going to pay for
much is it? Why were you saying $6 Mil in the first place? Forget to divide by 4?
I mean Cityglider was 5 mil for 138 "high frequency operation" hours per week of operation, over 7.5km of route from scratch.
Call it 1035 'units' of frequent route needing funding.
The 'unit' represents the resources needed to run a route. For the same funding basically, you could be twice as long, but half as frequent (Think of that planning game Jarret Walker runs )
Doing what you said, and rolling all of the resources of both the 230 and 235 together to form a BUZ...Well to start with its a combined half hourly frequency right?
230 is 13.6km of route, with say a minimum of ~70 extra "high frequency operation hours needed" (I got this figure by weighting it at 1 for periods when no service exists (Eg after 9pm on a Sunday) and 0.5 for hours when it needs to change from 2 to 4 bph (Eg daytimes)
Call it 925 'units' of frequent route needing funding.
Even when you pool together the 230/235 resources, I estimate it would be around $4.45 Million of
additional funding per year, to give the area one high frequency route.
4.5 Million represents the costs that cant be plugged by redistributing buses in the area.
If we take the 1.5 million per year from the free ferry proposal, thats still $3 Mil per year TL or someone needs to fund.
Back to the topic...I think cross river ferries are something that could be free (rather than travel 'along' the river like this proposal)
Point is, there are a lot of places where bridges wont be viable/are years off and ferries are the only option for people taking active transport.
Except you have to pay a full zone fare for only a short distance of travel. On Go Card its equivalent to $12 per km to Go From Norman Park to New Farm.
