The article talks a lot about the problem, but only briefly touches upon the solution.
“Five per cent of our community use public transport — that’s so low because it isn’t being seen as a viable alternative,” he said.
"It’s not efficient, and it’s not regular enough.
“It’s an ineffective way of getting people off the Bruce Highway, getting them off the roads.”
That’s it. That’s all it says about the most important thing that can be done to fix the issue. The Caboolture and Kippa-Ring lines need to be upgraded to run a bunch faster. The Albany Creek, Samford, Dayboro triangle needs access to some serious form of trunk line. And all three of the main areas that make up the City of Moreton Bay need much better access to high frequency bus routes taking them to places like local shops, schools, and to those trunk routes.
And while we’re at it, that should be more affordable than it currently is. Caboolture (or even just Petrie) to the city costs a whopping $60 per week if you travel 5 days.
Don’t worry, the experts are clearly focussed on fixing the lack of public transport as outlined by the very next paragraph after your quote above…
“A spokesperson for the Department of Transport and Main Roads said $1.529 billion dollars had been specifically allocated for road projects in the Moreton Bay region.”
Imagine how many trains and buses they could put on for that much money.
Yeah, but
A spokesperson for the Department of Transport and Main Roads said $1.529 billion dollars had been specifically allocated for road projects in the Moreton Bay region.
So we can’t invest in public transport but we can pour some more money into road expansions!
I used to commute from North Brisbane to Caboolture. Always fortunate enough to be going the opposite direction of the traffic. The Bruce seriously is a carpark. It feels so absurd when you just drive past all of these cars parked on a highway.
It’s gotten so bad even non-peak direction or well outside of peak hour is often still a terrible drive.
If we had good public transport I’d never do it. But even with traffic as bad as it is, it still somehow takes longer to get to Landsborough than it would to drive. And Landsborough is a ridiculous place to have the closest station to the Sunshine Coast, because then you’ve somehow got to get across to the coastal towns. Roma Street to a Caloundra Station should be doable in under an hour, and then a little more to continue up as far as Noosa.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Linda McCallum grew up on the Redcliffe Peninsula – on the eastern coastal edge of the council area – and remembers travelling to Caboolture with her mum in the 1960s.
Ms McCallum said travelling west to visit her friend at Wamuran, on the shire’s north-western edge, takes her an hour in peak traffic.
Bryan Wiseman volunteers with men’s support organisation Band of Brothers, which estimates about 500 people in the region are facing homelessness or living in inadequate housing.
Housing affordability data calculated by CoreLogic reveals the average household in northern Moreton Bay uses 51 per cent of its income to service a mortgage.
Earlier this year, Moreton Bay Council approved the first development for Waraba – formerly known as Caboolture West – which is expected to eventually house 70,000 people.
Cr Flannery said the area west of the Bruce Highway will account for 70 per cent of future growth, but needs more public investment for trunk infrastructure like water and sewerage.
The original article contains 699 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Easy fix for coastal cities, hydrofoil electric ferries from sunny coast to Brisbane and goldie to Brisbane. No need for new infrastructure and imagine how quick they could fly across the water with no traffic lights or parking to contend with?
It’s an interesting idea to think about, but I doubt it would work on practice.
The biggest advantage trains have is scale. You can easily get a train capable of carrying hundreds of passengers that travels at high speed. High speed boats tend to be more like buses, carrying dozens of passengers.
I think boats would also be more affected by inclement weather conditions than would trains.
I’m having trouble finding data on it, but I don’t think boats carrying large amount of passengers even go that fast. The best I can find says they tend to top out around 100, 110 km/h. To make the east coast route viable we need to be averaging (including time stopped at stations) somewhere around 200 km/h at least.
I think it would still work for Brisbane, the hydrofoil boats rise out of the water so they don’t experience the jostling you get in a conventional boat. You can have several ferries running back and forth morning noon and night that carry hundreds of patrons per ferry. You don’t need to build massive expensive tracks and they don’t stop at every two bit town and suburb. These are only linking major population hubs. The hydrofoil here has a top speed of about 50km/h which is average, but it would be travelling in a straight line up and down the coast and the Brissy trains only ever get up to about 80km/h and you have to travel inland to hop on one in the Sunny coast.
Here’s a video of the tech which could be scaled up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2RUVfEWQcE
Oh yeah sorry, I mistook which thread this was in. I thought you were proposing an alternative to high speed rail for Brisbane-Sydney-Melbourne trips. For a Redcliffe to Brisbane trip it might be a bit more viable, but the choke-point getting into the river past Fisherman Island might be an obstacle, and I think the speed limit in the river itself would be prohibitive to the boat being competitive with the existing train.
As for the sunny coast, there are already plans to add a rail link directly to the coast, and I think the problems with Redcliffe would be amplified on this route, thanks to the additional need to extend the trip to go around Bribie Island.
But I do love the out-of-the-box thinking.
