Some thoughts on Australia’s biggest Bus Rapid Transit deployment
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Brisbane’s busways
Tag: Brisbane
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Brisbane: south to north
(As usual with my travelogues, this is backdated to the day.) Sunday morning in Brisbane. More perfect weather! We planned a visit to University of Queensland. By the lake is a bench in memory of my dad, so it’s a must for our family holidays. Last time I was there, the bench was looking a ... [More]
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Brisbane long weekend
For those of you who follow my blog for the public transport content, the next few posts will be one of my travelogues… but of course you will also find some PT observations in here. I quite like a winter warmer getaway, and this year an option presented itself: Brisbane for my aunt’s 80th birthday ... [More]
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Train punctuality around Australia
A remark on social media inspired this: a quick comparison of suburban train punctuality in Australia. We have suburban rail networks in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, and all of them publish monthly punctuality data. So here’s a quick graph comparing them since January last year: Some caveats: Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide consider “on-time” ... [More]
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PT patronage in our biggest cities
Obviously, travel demand in cities is in turmoil just at the moment, but leaving the 2020-2022 blip aside for a minute, and looking again at pre-COVID travel in cities… As a follow-up to comparing Melbourne’s public transport patronage to Sydney’s, I thought I’d look at all the big capital cities. The five biggest are also ... [More]
Here is my collection of Australian public transport smartcards. The ones I’m missing are Adelaide, Canberra and Tasmania — all of which have been introduced since my last visits there. Notably Perth’s SmartRider is the only card that is blank on the back, which is why the card number (which I’ve blacked-out) is on the ... [More]
The Phase 2 Report from the High Speed Rail study was released last week — predicting that although HSR would cover its recurrent (running/maintenance) costs, it’d first take some $114 billion and 45 years to build it. As I’ve said before, I think a 3-ish hour trip from Melbourne to Sydney would be time-competitive with ... [More]
I was interested to see this post complaining about Brisbane bus services to the University of Queensland. In this Courier Mail article it appears that the most overcrowded bus services in Brisbane all serve university precincts. My dad was editor of the UQ student newspaper Semper Floreat in 1951. UQ has recently put many (possibly ... [More]
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Buses, trains, and bus ways
Today’s Movember update here (I’ll post the latest pics to the blog every 2-3 days.) A lot of people express a preference of trains over buses. I suspect it’s mostly about ride quality. Railed vehicles are generally going to be smoother than tyred vehicles. And there’s also perception of permanence (and in Melbourne, perception of ... [More]
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Brisbane day 6 – heading home
Thursday 6th October Alas, the day came to depart Brisbane and head back home. Perhaps it’s inevitable these days that travelling interstate pretty much requires setting aside most or all of the day just for the journey. I suppose it’s a consequence of modern air travel, which requires getting to and from airports, and lengthy ... [More]
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Brisbane day 5 – Surfers Paradise
Wednesday 5th October The first job was to return the hire car. Similar to the circuitous route filling it up the night before, due to the one way streets, this involved a 750 metre drive (Google Maps estimated time: 4 minutes), and then a 170 metre walk back (estimated: 2 minutes). Turning out of Raff ... [More]
Tuesday 4th October It was time to go bush. We picked up a booked car at Europcar (around the corner from the hotel, though it turned out Thrifty was also close-by) and after some negotiating of central Brisbane’s one way streets, found the Pacific Motorway. One way streets don’t affect one as a pedestrian, but ... [More]