Article: Busways the key to Brisbane growth, expert says

[ozbob]

From the Brisbanetimes click here!

Busways the key to Brisbane growth, expert says

Busways the key to Brisbane growth, expert says
November 13, 2012 - 3:00AM
Tony Moore

Brisbane should plan to expand its network of busways as more questions are asked of its toll tunnels, according to one of the country's leading transport experts.

Professor David Hensher, the founding director of the Institute of Transport and Logistic Studies at the University of Sydney, said Brisbane was getting better efficiency from its busways than Sydney was from its inner-city rail network.

"You have to see a road as multi-modal, not just for cars," he said.

Professor Hensher said southeast Queensland was "leading the world" with its busway network.

Brisbane has the Southeast Busway, the Eastern Busway, the Northern Busway and the Boggo Road Busway.

"You are building roads to put high capacity vehicles on and you are seeing the benefits of it," Professor Hensher said.

"The actual patronage that southeast Queensland is carrying on these busways in the peak is higher than what we are carrying on CityRail in Sydney.

"You are getting over 20,000 an hour in your best peak there, we are not getting anywhere near that in Sydney in the best peak."

In contrast, the city's toll tunnels have attracted less traffic than projected.

The Clem7, between Woolloongabba and Bowen Hills, was placed in the hands of liquidators in 2011 after disappointing traffic figures.

Airport Link, which opened in July, was yesterday removed from stock market trading by its owners BrisConnections after its bankers asked questions over its debt and revenue projections.

Airport Link's traffic figures are below the anticipated figures, in its first month of paid traffic.

Brisbane City Council maintains its Legacy Way toll tunnel, between the Centenary Highway and the Inner City Bypass, will be viable, although ratepayers will pay any default.

Professor Hensher, who was an advisor to the Airport Link project, warned against making quick judgments of success or failure of toll roads.

"It does takes time for the market of traffic to settle down, but having said that we can be quite critical of traffic forecasts being ramped up too early to be attractive to equity investors," he said.

"That is the big concern I have."

Professor Hensher said he favoured expanding busways in an urban renewal project, over building a Brisbane "outer ring road", a policy that has been considered and rejected before.

"If they are not seen as urban revitalisation projects, where you can integrate bus networks into the road as well as cars, then I have some doubts about their merits," he said.

"Railways are too expensive to deliver in a timely fashion, whereas busways can."

However Brisbane has two such projects – the new rail line from Richlands to Springfield and the Moreton Bay line from Petrie to Kippa-Ring – now under way.

Professor Hensher said people should not judge toll roads themselves as inefficient pieces of infrastructure.

"The most important question that should be asked however is 'what might the (traffic) network look like if we had done nothing and stuck to governments doing things?'," he said.

"We would never have had the level of road investment that we now got.

"I suspect that society might be paying a high price, in the sense that it has bought the benefits forward in time, but at a fairly high cost."

Professor Hensher said Australia needs a new model for public private partnerships, where risk was better spread between the public sector and the private sector.

The Australian Government released its own re-thinking on PPP projects in September, through a research paper from Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese.

The paper, Review of Traffic Forecasting Performance of Toll Roads, was critical of traffic estimates on toll roads.

"Anecdotal evidence suggests that the forecasting performance for Australian toll roads may have been even worse than the world average," the report says in its executive summary.

"Forecasting errors can be caused by many factors including inadequate models, data limitations, uncertainties in socio-economic and land use forecasts, ramp-up risks, and optimism bias and/or strategic mis-representation."

The study also notes that bad assumptions during the ramp-up period can damage a toll project.

"Poor forecasting performance in the ramp-up period can be caused by a number of factors including inappropriate assumptions about the ramp-up profile, bias in the predicted long-term equilibrium demand and neglect of the impact of short-term events on demand such as recessions."

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/busways-the-key-to-brisbane-growth-expert-says-20121112-298ik.html

[ozbob]

Blog comment:

Professor Hensher is a long standing biased pro-bus academic.  Why is it Professor that all significant cities use rail and integrated bus?  Rail gives the capacity needed. Brisbane bus network is already breaking down.  Cross River Rail will transform the rail network and in effect allow a much better integrated public transport network. Brisbane will ultimately need a true metro network.

Pity Hensher's claims were not challenged in the article.  In fact Sydney CityRail has an average of one million trips made to and from 307 stations on weekdays --> http://www.cityrail.info/about/facts  Simply not possible to do that on bus.

[ozbob]

Says it all ... " ... Professor Hensher, who was an advisor to the Airport Link project ... "

[curator49]

Buses and Busways have their place as part of an integrated public transport system but rail is the only form of public transport that can cope with very large volumes of patronage.

Someone here can correct my figures as it is from memory and I should have written it down at the time. When Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast of the United States recently and the public transport system failed. Buses were the first to be got going again followed by limited services on the underground rail system as tunnels were pumped out and electrical systems checked/repaired. It was stated that the buses could in no way cope with the public transport requirements of New York with something like 1 million people a day being carried on buses and resultant traffic jams but the underground rail system could carry 5.5 million passengers per day.

The trouble is Governments use the likes of Hensher's one-sided reports as a "cop out" in not providing the infrastructure required for rail transport.

As long as the Brisbane City Council has responsibility for the bus network in Brisbane and with no input or responsibility for anything to do with the rail network then they will always push the "bus solution" to the detriment of rail.

I shudder to think what we as ratepayers will be up for when Legacy Way fails to meet its suggested volumes of vehicles per day. The ratepayers right across Brisbane do not yet realise or understand that we are the guarantors to make up any losses that might be incurred by Legacy Way.

[ozbob]

David Hensher is to be taken with a grain of salt.  He has a monthly column in Australasian Bus + Coach where he basically savages the notion of spending on anything except buses, and his work tends to that vein.

Exactly ...

[somebody]

"You are getting over 20,000 an hour in your best peak there, we are not getting anywhere near that in Sydney in the best peak."

How does Prof Hensher figure this pearler?

Central platform 16 received 21 715 passengers per hour in the busiest hour in Sep 2010, and 23 830 in March 2012.

[ozbob]

Interesting blog comments --> http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/busways-the-key-to-brisbane-growth-expert-says-20121112-298ik.html#comments

[colinw]

Argh!  I wish this bollocks would stop.

I think Brisbane's busways have been a very good thing, and certainly can be credited with a major growth in patronage driven primarily by service frequency & speed that was/is missing on the rail lines. It remains a thought experiment to consider what comparable service improvement & marketing would have done for rail in Brisbane, as it appears that our handful of 4TPH rail services are a classified state secrets.

Unfortunately it seems that the busways are starting to approach their limits (on the southside at least, northside is a different story due to under servicing and the half baked nature of the recent extension). The capacity problem isn't the busway itself, but inner city stops starting at about Buranda or Mater Hill, which leaves us with the busway needing its own version of CRR otherwise it will end up in exactly the same bind as the rail system.  It is hard to see how the busway can sustain continued patronage growth at the levels of the mid 2000s unless it is recast as a more "metro like" operation with many through routes changed to feeders and the busway itself reserved for a high frequency core service with high capacity vehicles - i.e. treat it more like a railway.

Where I think where busways and BRT in general fall down are in a few areas:

1.  The number of vehicles, and drivers, required to provide a service. Compare 14 LRT vehicles on the Gold Coast with the dozens of buses needed to do the same job now, or 200 or so trains for a similar passenger volume to thousands of buses.
2.  Service life of vehicles & fleet replacement. Buses have a service life of only 10-15 years, whereas trains & trams easily go 40+ years with a mid-life upgrade.
3. Comfort & passenger perception of the service. Yeah I know this makes some people see red, but to many people buses are quite simply unattractive and nearly invisible as a service, particularly where they run on street. Rail, light rail and the busway attract passengers due to system presence, and (more so for rail) system image and comfort. To gain patronage, your system has to be something that people actually want to ride!

I'll end up by quoting my two deliberately pro-rail rants that I posted on BT:

Hensher is full of it. The busways in Brisbane work ok up to a certain point, but are already running out of capacity where a rail line with the same land footprint would be loafing along with capacity to spare. Hensher also ignores the fact that to carry comparable passenger numbers to a few dozen trains required hundreds if not thousands of buses, with the staff that goes with that. Case in point - the new light rail system on the Gold Coast will carry something like 40% of all public transport passengers on the gold coast with a mere 14 rail vehicles, replacing dozens of buses on the same route. Those buses - and drivers - will then be free to provide feeder services to areas where rail will never be viable.

The fact is that while Brisbane's busways do well and are providing us with capacity equivalent to a fairly modest light rail system, they are a poor substitute indeed for a properly serviced metro or heavy rail line which would have capacity to spare when the busways are already clogging up and experiencing congestion.

The authorities will listen to Hensher at their peril, for that way lies transport failure. Buses are inherently a feeder & coverage mode which perform a 3rd rate job when tasked with the core rapid transit role.

The comparison with CityRail in Sydney is also bogus - CityRail is acknowledged widely to be one of the least efficient urban railways anywhere, and yet it still manages to carry many times the passenger numbers of Brisbane's busways, with a vastly greater geographical coverage. If you tried to replace it with busways Sydney's public transport would choke.

Beware of road industry spin. Enough of this planning for failure.

and

If busways are so darn efficient, why is it that the poster child for busways - Ottawa, Canada - on which Brisbane's busways are modelled is now converting its core busway system to rail because the buses could not cope and the inner city was getting congested with buses? There are very few large cities in the world which manage to do it with busways only. The only significant ones are Bogota Colombia (now considering building a metro), Curitiba, Brazil (also about to build a metro), Ottawa, Canada (converting the core busway to light rail), Lagos, Nigera (light rail under construction), also one busway in Los Angeles (but building lots of rail now), plus a handful of much smaller places well below Brisbane's size.

[somebody]

"You are getting over 20,000 an hour in your best peak there

I don't think there is 20k/hr @Cultural Centre or on the Capt Cook Bridge (each get about 200 buses/hr).  It's the combination which reach this figure.  Hardly fair to compare that to a pair of rail tracks.

[SurfRail]

Colin - minor point to raise, but only minor - transit buses in Australia tend to have a longer service life than you have indicated (20-25 years), which is more because of ongoing failures in fleet replacement strategy and because our designs tend to be built for durability (partially because of the operating environment and partially because of reason 1).

We don't have a secondary market to flog off old buses to like they do in Europe (ie sell them to Eastern Europe), so things just keep running until they can be sold to another operator or scrapped. 

BT is quite rare in having a very low average fleet age, because of the fairly rapid expansion of the past decade.  Compare with State Transit in Sydney who have only just retired their last O305, the first of which entered service in the late 1970s.  BT's oldest bus is from 1991, while STA still have plenty of mid-80s models going, and their fleet hasn't increased in size markedly for a very long time.

However, you quite correctly point out that trams and trains last longer, which is the main thing.

[somebody]

However, you quite correctly point out that trams and trains last longer, which is the main thing.

I think the main thing is that they are more reliable in service.  The extra life has almost no impact on the Net Present Value.

Busways may be approaching capacity, but some works around the Allen St "loop" should free up a huge amount of capacity.  It irks me that the Eastern Busway aggravated this bottleneck.

As for the northern busway, I don't see the point of the bit beyond Federation St.

[SurfRail]

As for the northern busway, I don't see the point of the bit beyond Federation St.

Not in it's current state, with no priority signalling, badly design approach intersections, no link to Federation Street with bus lanes (and no apparent plan to build a proper busway in this stretch), surface routes duplicating the busway etc.

Usual Queensland thing - build something that will only be effective with about 40 pre-conditions, but only satisfy 4 of them.  Same for Richlands (frequency, Ellen Grove Station, proper junctions and track arrangements through to Corinda etc), Cross River Rail (chop off 100% of the approach works and probably build only 6-car platforms etc)...

Gold Coast Rapid Transit is about the only thing that isn't a major screwup, but even there we have 3 (admittedly minor) issues - limited initial system length, the fact that the previously 100% separate alignment will now involve a shared traffic lane in Surfers for a few hundred metres between Elkhorn and Cypress Avenues northbound (unavoidable due to space problems), and the annual shutdown of one track which will be needed for the rev-head festival at Main Beach.

[colinw]

Colin - minor point to raise, but only minor - transit buses in Australia tend to have a longer service life than you have indicated (20-25 years), which is more because of ongoing failures in fleet replacement strategy and because our designs tend to be built for durability (partially because of the operating environment and partially because of reason 1).

My bad, thought it was less than that. Thanks for the correction.

Regarding Gold Coast Light Rail, I have to wonder if 14 trams is going to be enough. I can see the system fairly rapidly needing more frequent service and running out of trams. Well, hopefully stage 2 will proceed in time for the 2018 Commonwealth Games, and will include another 8 or so trams.

[SurfRail]

They've previously said they can manage 5 minute frequencies for shorter periods with what they have - just need about an extra tram per route kilometre for any extensions.

[somebody]

"You are getting over 20,000 an hour in your best peak there, we are not getting anywhere near that in Sydney in the best peak."

How does Prof Hensher figure this pearler?

Central platform 16 received 21 715 passengers per hour in the busiest hour in Sep 2010, and 23 830 in March 2012.

Re: ozbob's blog comment - Central platform 16 receives Northern line and Western line trains.

[ozbob]

"You are getting over 20,000 an hour in your best peak there, we are not getting anywhere near that in Sydney in the best peak."

How does Prof Hensher figure this pearler?

Central platform 16 received 21 715 passengers per hour in the busiest hour in Sep 2010, and 23 830 in March 2012.

Re: ozbob's blog comment - Central platform 16 receives Northern line and Western line trains.

Yes, thanks.  Fixed that up.

[colinw]

Anyone know what the peak passenger flows inbound are on the busway at Mater Hill, Southbank & Cultural Centre (for example).  I'm seeing claims of nearly 25000 per hour, and cannot for the life of me figure out how that many buses could possibly jam through there. Lets say 75 people per bus - 25000 per hour would require about 334 buses, or a bus every 10 to 11 seconds. That would be fine on the busway itself, but at stations and at Melbourne St Portal and across the Victoria Bridge I just can't see it working.

What is the busway REALLY carrying?

[SurfRail]

I wouldn't be too concerned with what Mr HU0N is going on about.  He/she/it is no transport planner - previous arguments have basically been about restricting where people can move with planning controls rather than accommodating freedom of movement by building infrastructure.  In it's mind, there is no functional difference between a motorway and a railway because they are both symptomatic of the same problem (ie that people need to go places).

[colinw]

Yeah, writing this one off as a 'walk away'. Tried countering that crap once before and ended up arguing in circles about semantics.  In any case, I don't want to come off too negative about the busway because it really is the best performer in SEQ public transport (which says volumes about how badly we're letting our rail system fail).

[HappyTrainGuy]

As for the northern busway, I don't see the point of the bit beyond Federation St.

Not in it's current state, with no priority signalling, badly design approach intersections, no link to Federation Street with bus lanes (and no apparent plan to build a proper busway in this stretch), surface routes duplicating the busway etc.

The Chermside exit end is now give way but still traffic would pass the 330 bus at the Albion portal and when the bus exits the busway you'll come across that same traffic waiting at the lights outside the cemetary or the traffic it was first with is no where to be seen. Not long ago I was stopped at the busway entrance at the Chermside portal end and saw a 370 pull up at the bus stop across from the entrance. The 77 got the green light just as the 370 left the stop. By the time the 77 got to the tunnel exit the same 370 was already waiting to merge onto the busway

The real northern busway is still and will always be useless regardless of it having proper entry/exit and buslanes. It wasn't until AirportLink started that the Kedron area actually had better traffic managment/flow when they started closing off side streets, crossing facilities and the alike that should have been done ages ago. The Albion end has been made worse because of the busway as what was once 4 lanes of thru traffic and 1 around thru/1 must right turn lane (effectivly 5 thru lanes) has been merged into 2 thru lanes and one must right turn lane citybound. From Albion Road to the school used to be 4 lanes (2 thru over the hill/2 thru around the hill) and from the school-Train tracks 3 lanes (2 thu lanes down the hill/2 around thru lanes merge to form 1 thru lane). And there were T3 lanes aswell through all of this which have sadly been removed. Northbound Train tracks-School has remained the same at 3 lanes but from the school to Albion Road has gone from 3 thru lanes + 2 must turn right at the intersection to 3 thru lanes + 1 must turn right + 2 must turn right at the intersection. Albion Road-Servo used to be 3 thru lanes with a merge to two at the servo to now merge to 2 lanes at the busway entrance portal for 2 thru lanes and one must turn left lane at the intersection prior to the servo with 2 thru lanes intersection-servo. Bradshaw Street-Chermside used to be 3 lanes all the way but from Kedron park Road intersection its turned into 2 thru lanes and one must exit left lane. The only time buses struggle on Gympie Road-City was during the peak hours around Lutwyche and a bus lane during peak hour/fixing the Chalk-Bradshaw Street intersections/widening Gympie road to 3 lanes along the 700-800m of road through Lutwyche would have solved that issue but instead opted for the expensive must be a tunnel busway. Redesigning the bus network on Brisbanes northside (even still with the busway 77/330/331/332/333s all bunch up from the Albion portal-Federation Street portal) would have also helped by getting more people onto the nearby railway lines and other services at interchanges (remember at the time only inbound 325s, 2 or 3 outbound 325s one of the 336/337s and a few inbound and outbound 327s (I think the 326 all passed after 9am) fed into Geebung station/now 328-329, inbound 335-339's, no outbound 335's from Taigum and one outbound 340 fed into Carseldine station/nothing feeds Sunshine, only the 680/2 outbound 327s feed Bald Hills station before 9am). Most of the additional bus services and buzed routes was just a smoke screen to cover the fact of how bad the PT network really was.

Take the 330. 7pm at night on its 30 minute frequency it could run RBWH bus station-Chermside interchange easily in under 10 minutes and that was with the weird busway entry setup straight outside the RBWH (I found it so bloody amusing each time when some 330/333/340 drivers would just miss the lights and they would back track under the busway to Butterfield Street to merge with traffic onto Bowen Bridge road to then pass the same buses that just missed the lights at the busway exit waiting for the lights. Some drivers would give a wave or a quick honk of the horn as they passed  ) but even with the give way priority now available it can still be a challenge just because of the whole layout with the red lights and ability to run Newmarket road under greens.

[ozbob]

Yeah, writing this one off as a 'walk away'. Tried countering that cr%p once before and ended up arguing in circles about semantics.  In any case, I don't want to come off too negative about the busway because it really is the best performer in SEQ public transport (which says volumes about how badly we're letting our rail system fail).

All in the game Colin.  NSW based transport experts always amuse a little.  In the middle of one of the biggest transport basket cases known to modern man, and they are happy to advise everyone else.  Gee, if they had been proactive in their own bailiwick there might be a better system.

[somebody]

NSW based transport experts always amuse a little.  In the middle of one of the biggest transport basket cases known to modern man, and they are happy to advise everyone else.  Gee, if they had been proactive in their own bailiwick there might be a better system.

Touche.

Judged against the criteria they try to achieve, they are actually pretty successful.  What's off peak?

[colinw]

NSW based transport experts always amuse a little.  In the middle of one of the biggest transport basket cases known to modern man, and they are happy to advise everyone else.

ROFL.  Going to Sydney for PT advice is like asking a Government official from Pyongyang about Human Rights.

[Mr X]

Busways are a third world solution to transport issues. Cheap and tacky- yuck! Except in our case they aren't even cheap!! SE Busway is nice but it should be a metro!

On the other hand, rail isn't always better. Just look at our woeful train system... bleh... and things like metros CAN be badly managed, inefficient and slow- just take a leaf out of Paris' book. You can walk quicker than their metro trains.

[colinw]

IMHO busways have their place, and the SE busway is a rather good place for one.  The SE busway made quite a lot of sense at the time it was built, based on the existing bus routes to the area and the use of the SE freeway corridor which has gradients where rail would struggle. The existing bus services in the area were well patronised, but were badly hampered by running along main roads or the SE freeway, and the projected patronage was way lower than what was actually achieved, so there was not a strong case for rail.

In hindsight, yes, perhaps the SE busway should have been a metro, but I really don't think that was obvious in the 1990s when it was planned.

What the busway ended up proving was that if you run decent frequency public transport that has a reasonable average speed due to Class A ROW and station spacing that isn't too close, people will use it. This gets conflated into "busways are way better than rail" in certain quarters, mainly because the busway was the first properly serviced high performing PT route in Brisbane, while the rail remains hampered by crappy service frequency and low speed thanks to legacy alignment and way too close station spacing.

What really annoys me 'though is that the high performance of the SE busway continues to be seen in QLD planning circles as a vindication of MODE rather than an argument for SERVICE STANDARD.  We keep getting old that people ride the thing because it is a busway, when in reality they ride the thing because it runs frequently and gets fed by buses from their local area. If the rail lines were frequent and well fed they would get used better as well, so 80%+ of our dedicated transit infrastructure just sits there loafing because we're too damn stupid to use it properly.

One place I would love to see a busway would be to serve the new satellite city development at Yarrabilba.  Run the the thing along the old Bethania to Logan Village rail line, interchange with rail at Bethania or Loganlea, but then hop the Logan River and continue to Logan Hyperdome via Tanah Merah. While part of me would love to see a diesel railcar service to Logan Village / Yarrabilba, and I have argued for that in the past, I think a low cost non gold plated busway using that particular old rail corridor could be a real winner particularly if it bridged the river past Bethania and tied in Logan Hyperdome & 555, the Beenleigh/Gold Coast line, and the new Yarrabilba development.

[#Metro]

Anyone know what the peak passenger flows inbound are on the busway at Mater Hill, Southbank & Cultural Centre (for example).  I'm seeing claims of nearly 25000 per hour, and cannot for the life of me figure out how that many buses could possibly jam through there. Lets say 75 people per bus - 25000 per hour would require about 334 buses, or a bus every 10 to 11 seconds. That would be fine on the busway itself, but at stations and at Melbourne St Portal and across the Victoria Bridge I just can't see it working.

What is the busway REALLY carrying?

The figures are correct. There are buses every 12 seconds or so at the Alan Street intersection. During peak hour half go over the captain cook bridge, and half go via South Bank.

I think the busways have been great because of the speed, frequency and span of hours as well as integrated ticketing and two tier express and local service pattern. So on these counts, David Hensher is right. I've shown, exhaustively, previously that rail on the SEB would have to be of Paris RER standard with SACEM ($$$) installed and CRR tunnel ($$$) and supernatural crystal ball  / god like foresight by the engineers to provide equivalently good service. Which is NOT going to happen.

Where David Hensher is wrong though, is to suggest further busway extension, at least for a while. The QR system is already there, has 150 stations or so, with 85 of those stations (so about 60%) within the BCC boundary. This means that most people in Brisbane live near a train station. The problems with Queensland Rail come from the lack of frequency, the disproportionate effect that the ticketing system has on rail (because rail in QLD is currently a worse product than the bus network, even though they cost the same the value for money is not the same between rail and bus) and this is easy to show in the CFN map of Brisbane, unacceptable service frequency (30 minutes is third world), unacceptable span, unacceptable lack of connections and orbital bus routes and botching of key infrastructure points so that the network is riddled with major capacity constraints and can't function properly.

We could have a very good train network, very quickly if we stopped paying Concrete Fiesta Constructions Ltd, proposing Maroon CityGliders and building rail extensions and busway extensions at hundreds of millions of dollars of cost that all have zero net mobility increase because the services don't follow.

There is a good case for spending more money on more bus routes - a bus grid, especially on direct to the CBD CFN routes from The Centenary, Northwest and Bulimba Suburbs down main arterial roads. There is a good case for boosting train services. Concrete can come later.

As I have always said, if we had spent what we spend on ONE kilometre of concrete instead, on services, Brisbane would be SATURATED in decent PT.

[#Metro]

The file is here, page 8. Figures from 2007. It would be more now.
The figure is the result of buses being able to do short headways of around ~ 10 sec.

http://www.patrec.org/web_docs/atrf/papers/2009/1834_paper152-Bitzios.pdf

[#Metro]

You know what, it would be better if the toll was on the busway - you'd get closer to the passenger forecast!!

[#Metro]

This is the stand out comment, because it is so so true.

I live near Buranda busway/rail station, catch the bus 95% of the time. It is quicker, more frequent, cleaner and by design less interaction with annoying passengers. I love the busway.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/busways-the-key-to-brisbane-growth-expert-says-20121112-298ik.html#ixzz2C5RtS9Dn

Make the trains clean, quick (Two tier), frequent and you will have a decent rail network.

[colinw]

But trains are slow, dirty outdated things that trundle along ancient rail lines every half hour, stopping at thriving metropolises like Rocklea, Ebbw Vale and Hemmant!

(At least, according to Queensland Transport).

[ozbob]

The SE busway is already at peak capacity.  A fact acknowledged by TMR.  This has restricted additional services eg. Eastern Busway.  TransLink are looking at options, they will need to move to a rail model (trunk and feeder) to get any more real gains, and that will be limited in the end. Peak delays are becoming constant.

Rail will get progressively ramped up, frequency is the issue.  The comment re Buranda is just stating the obvious.  A new busway station with buses every few minutes against a station 50 plus years old with 30 minute frequency. 

The other thing about busway hype, most of Brisbane doesn't have access to a busway and for that reason much more emphasis has to be placed on a better bus grid cfn etc. and fixing up the rail frequency.  Those that do have busway access don't really understand the bus grief much of the population has to put up with.  Much more of the community has access to rail.  No more major construction within Brisbane (except CRR) as such just use what we have properly. 

TransLink and governments have actually failed the community by not focusing on the real needs of the entire community.  They concentrate on and over resource the bus ways and let the rest of the network, bus and rail limp on ..  BCC is part of the problem of course, they still see rail as a competitor.

[#Metro]

This is the reason why the CFN MUST be pushed through. It is so damn cheap when compared to the alternatives, it irritates me why they haven't done it quicker.

The SE busway is already at peak capacity.  A fact acknowledged by TMR.  This has restricted additional services eg. Eastern Busway.  TransLink are looking at options, they will need to move to a rail model (trunk and feeder) to get any more real gains, and that will be limited in the end. Peak delays are becoming constant.

Rail will get progressively ramped up, frequency is the issue.  The comment re Buranda is just stating the obvious.  A new busway station with buses every few minutes against a station 50 plus years old with 30 minute frequency.

The main bottleneck is the Class B ROW at Cultural Centre and capacity constraints caused by 'friction' congestion of buses pulling in and out. The busways otherwise work well.

[ozbob]

This is so true TT.  Hensher cannot see that, he is just bus .. 

Where David Hensher is wrong though, is to suggest further busway extension, at least for a while. The QR system is already there, has 150 stations or so, with 85 of those stations (so about 60%) within the BCC boundary. This means that most people in Brisbane live near a train station. The problems with Queensland Rail come from the lack of frequency, the disproportionate effect that the ticketing system has on rail (because rail in QLD is currently a worse product than the bus network, even though they cost the same the value for money is not the same between rail and bus) and this is easy to show in the CFN map of Brisbane, unacceptable service frequency (30 minutes is third world), unacceptable span, unacceptable lack of connections and orbital bus routes and botching of key infrastructure points so that the network is riddled with major capacity constraints and can't function properly.