Brisbane’s busways

If you’ve been following my Brisbane holiday blogs, you’d know we caught a few buses.

Brisbane once had a big tram network. They were all replaced by buses in the 1960s.

By 1988 they’d built the CBD Queen Street Bus Station, with many routes diverting under Queen Street and other city streets to skip traffic.

In the 1990s they went all in on busways, with the network steadily expanding. It’s now 27 km long, with busways heading from the CBD to the north and south-east, with a major branch to the University of Queensland.

I’d describe them as bus-only freeways, a way for the bus to travel along, completely separate from other traffic.

On one level it’s kind of curious that they built the busways, given like most Australian capital cities they’ve also got a pretty big suburban rail network. The busways came about thanks to strong advocacy from Brisbane City Council.

Arguably the busways have come at the expense of the rail network – for its size, it’s underutilised and the service underwhelming, mostly half-hourly frequencies, which is worse than Melbourne at most times.

Busways undoubtedly have some advantages:

• buses can bypass traffic congestion hotspots, particularly in the inner city
• the busways also serve as a limited stops routes, similar to trains, with stations every few kilometres, speeding up the trip from the outer suburbs
• the buses can also run on normal streets, so they can provide a one seat ride into areas where a high capacity mode is not practical and/or warranted – in Brisbane’s case this includes a lot of less frequent suburban routes that use the busways on the inner city sections.
• multiple routes can combine along the busway to provide high frequency/high capacity on the inner section
• the infrastructure can provide a higher quality passenger experience than regular bus stops, with large sheltered waiting areas, good lighting, and good pedestrian access into nearby traffic generators

But their are some down sides as well.

• capacity has its limits, as Brisbane is finding (see below). In fact they’re having to change to busway trunk routes plus interchange to/from local routes, reduce bus congestion in key parts of the network. This means a loss of the one seat ride advantage for some people.
• for the number of people moved, it’s very labour-intensive – even compared to Brisbane’s two-person crew trains
• ride quality on buses is never as good as rail, and my personal view is it’s fine for short trips but some people (myself included, if I’m honest) are less enthusiastic about long trips – eg a city to middle/outer suburb commute
• I do wonder about cost of busways compared to light rail, though it doesn’t have all the same benefits

Apart from route changes, they’re also trying to counter capacity issues with the introduction of “Brisbane Metro”, high capacity electric buses along the busiest routes.

We got to ride the M2 route, and it’s pretty good. Inside it looks like a tram, and it’s got good acceleration and speed. Ride quality is still not up to rail though.

Cultural Centre

While in Brisbane we stayed quite close to the Cultural Centre bus station, and used it several times.

This is probably the biggest point of congestion on the busway network. Dozens of bus routes converge here heading into Brisbane CBD from the south. The stop is a kind of controlled chaos.

It’s got two main platforms (platform 1 for inbound, 2 for outbound), each about five buses long, and an additional smaller outbound platform 3 down the street a bit.

Bus routes that enter the nearby South East Busway use platform 2; buses for other destinations use platform 3. Because buses only have doors on the left, they have to cross lanes at the signalised intersection between the platforms.

Platform 3 is new, an attempt to reduce congestion on platform 2. This is hardly surprising – I count 50 routes that use this station.

Even over the weekend, it was congested, with resurfacing works on the adjacent Victoria Bridge (where the buses go to get to the nearby CBD) adding to the queues of buses.

We found when catching buses there during our visit that it was a bit unclear where one should wait, as several buses would arrive at once, meaning your bus could be at the front, or at the back of the pack – too far to walk down to.

As a new/occasional user, this was a bit unnerving, but waiting near the front worked – hailing the bus driver seemed wise to ensure they stopped again if they’d already stopped once at the back to let people alight.

Another issue of so many routes passing through is that your bus won’t appear on the screens until it’s one of the next ten. In peak this might be only a couple of minutes before it arrives. It makes it less obvious if your bus is delayed or that it’s departing from another platform.

None of our rides had us boarding at the smaller platform 3, but on Sunday night I was passing and saw a couple confused as they watched their route 60 bus roll past platform 2 in the middle overtaking lane – I said to them “some buses go from over there” (pointing to platform 3) – they were able to run after it and catch it.

I also passed on Monday morning during peak, and watched buses queuing in the busway tunnel, waiting to get to the inbound platform 1.

No wonder there’s a big route reform package being implemented shortly to reduce the number of bus routes through here. More people will have to change routes during their journey.

Lessons for Melbourne?

I should note that Brisbane has two other things that make life easy for tourists: good quality data in Google Maps, and credit card fare payment. These are the lingua franca of public transport. With these available, it’s easy to arrive in a new city and use the network – assuming the service itself is up to scratch.

Brisbane’s busways are really interesting – you can see the potential for buses when a city invests heavily, and for the most part it seems very successful.

Could/should Melbourne do something like this?

There is a small section of busway being built along the Eastern Freeway as part of the North East Link project. But it’s likely to have only marginal effects on passenger travel times, given buses already have some priority on this section. For buses, the big problems are closer in.

Small deployments of Brisbane-style busway could be of benefit to help skip traffic bottlenecks, and avoid congestion. Around major shopping centres or on other parts of DART/Eastern Freeway routes might work well.

You probably wouldn’t build busways on a big scale like this in Melbourne – we’ve rightly gone for rail as the backbone of the PT network.

But Melbourne can certainly do much better on priority for buses.