After decades of car centric planning, Brisbane, Australia is
upgrading its public transport.
It's putting a new kind of trackless tram on the road and
tunnelling a new train line under the river.
Will it convince people to finally get out of their cars?
And can Brisbane fix its transit in time for the Olympic Games?
I am obsessed with public transport.
It is essential to cleaning and greening our cities.
Everywhere I go, I take trains, buses, trams and ferries to get to
know a city and its people.
I'm looking for ideas that other locations can copy and mistakes
that they should avoid.
Welcome to Brisbane, also increasingly known by
its indigenous name, Meanjin.
It's a subtropical
City with close to 3,000,000 residents across
its extended region.
If you haven't heard much about the city yet, you will soon,
because in 2032 it will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games and
its public transport system will be vital to getting people to its
stadiums.
But today the city is dominated by cars.
Governments have invested hugely in a network of underground highways,
but comparatively little in other forms of transit.
The result?
Experts now rate Brisbane as one of the worst cities in Australia for
public transport, while its roads keep getting busier.
The place is becoming gridlocked, the road congestion is getting
worse and worse.
Drivers can waste around 60 hours each year in peak hour traffic,
according to the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland.
At peak hour, on some roads or some motorways we do have congestion and
some of that is due to we have strong population growth.
And although we have quite a lot of road construction activity, greater
Brisbane is the fastest growing region in Australia.
The population is expected to double by 2050 and all
those new residents are bringing more vehicles.
Even car drivers are calling for better bus and train systems.
If you're a motorist, the best way of dealing with congestion is to
have the person who would have been in the car next to you make
a choice to use public transport or to ride their bike.
Here's how Brisbane gets around 79% of journeys are made in private
vehicles and only 10% by public.
Transport the vast majority of public transport journeys, 68%, are
made by bus, about 1/3 by train and a small number by ferry.
Brisbane once had a substantial tram network which carried more
passengers than all modes of public transport due today.
But during the 1960s car craze and after a big fire at a depot,
the trams were scrapped.
These remaining tracks are simply historical.
Today, Brisbane's public transport system runs mostly on buses.
It has a fleet of over 1200 buses, both standard and by articulated.
Also known as bendy or banana buses, the vast majority run on
diesel and gas, only a handful are electric.
Some scenic routes run across the iconic story bridge with
panoramic views of the city skyline.
Now my favorite thing about the buses is the politeness of most
passengers listen to how they thank the driver
when they're disembarking.
Thank you.
The bus system received a major upgrade about two decades ago when
the city built a rapid bus transit corridor with separated high
speed bus waves.
Transport experts say the bus ways are one thing Brisbane got right.
Brisbane bus system works just fine if you live on one of these high
speed bus way stations, but for everywhere else in the city you
need a lot of patience.
Some routes run only every half hour or every hour.
That makes it really hard to plan a journey.
The heavy train system is a radial network with several lines bringing
passengers from across the region into Brisbane city centre.
Trains carry about a third of all public transport users, but that's
only around 3% of the city's total journeys.
There are 10 lions, including one to the airport.
Some lines offer fantastic views, like the regional trains running N,
which pass right below the volcanic course of the
mighty Glasshouse Mountains.
But most people don't live near a train station.
There's no circle line connecting the outer districts, and many
services run infrequently, according to public transport
advocate Robert Dow.
That leaves some passengers feeling thirsty.
The rail network is characterized by low frequency, particularly as
you move out of the inner core.
Now that makes it very difficult to use, particularly when it's
connected to by low frequency bus services, and connections
become a nightmare.
And it's not unusual for people have to wait half an hour an hour.
You gotta go in the local club, never beer while you're waiting
for the train.
The train network is constrained by a bottleneck at its core.
This rail bridge is the only train connection over the Brisbane River,
but that same natural barrier is put to use for ferries.
There are several waterborne routes traversing the river, connecting to
parks, museums and universities.
The big catamarans are called city cats.
The little boats are called Kitty cats.
Ferries only carry around 3% of public transport passengers, but
they're very popular, especially with visitors.
This is my favorite form of public transport in Brisbane.
The ferries you get to see all the important sites along the river
and many of these services are free for the paid city cat services
ticketing works just like on buses and trains who tag on and off with
a topped up transit card or any credit card.
Then just enjoy the ride.
Bus upgrades are coming, not least because Brisbane has been named
host city of the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The main ceremonies will be held at an expanded stadium at
Woolloongabba, just across the river from the city centre.
To reach the stadium and resolve that problematic single bridge
bottleneck, work is underway on the New Cross River rail Line 2
massive boring machines have dug twin.
5.9 kilometre tunnels now 4 new stations are being fitted out and
are expected to open after 2025, but I couldn't wait that long to
have a look.
The Cross River rail team let me take a tour of the under
construction Woolloongabba station.
Here it is, the train tunnel that will one day bring 10s of
thousands of Olympic visitors to the main stadium.
The engineers here took lessons from other major tunnelling
projects around the world.
One of the fortunate things we've had here in Brisbane is we've been
entirely in rock.
Some of the other projects around the world where they're in Hong
Kong or maybe in London, they've had to deal with clay and Sands in.
In terms of ground support, yes, it's harder to hold up soft clay
than it is to.
Carve out, carve out rock, which has a natural tendency to
hold itself open.
Other learnings are from Crossrail in London.
It's probably one of the more advanced modern technological
underground railways and so we're learning the lessons around
platform stream doors integration, signalling systems and building
those lessons into Cross River Rail as we as we develop our project,
a new European train control system will allow trains to run
at higher frequencies.
Some say this rail tunnel should have been built decades ago, but
like a train, it's better late than never.
Brisbane has another fascinating transport development in the works.
They're calling it the metro.
The most contentious thing about the metro is its name.
It isn't an underground train line or subway.
These electric vehicles, built by the Swiss company Hess, look like
a tram, but they run on rubber wheels.
Some call this a type of trackless tram.
Others say it's a glorified bus.
Whatever they're called, the vehicles will run down.
Brisbane's existing busway at peak frequencies of five minutes, so why
didn't Brisbane just build a tram?
Our system itself has the benefit that the infrastructure side we
have a extensive bus bus way system which is dedicated purely for
the use of our public transport bus operations.
If the infrastructure is there and can be repurposed, it's a far more
cost effective solution to introduce a rubber tyred vehicle
with its charging system.
Than it is to introduce a light rail system.
The next step up in the in the public transport
capacity hierarchy.
The Metro's battery electric vehicles can carry around
170 passengers now.
That's about as many as an articulated or bendy bus.
Light rail can handle around 300 passengers per train, and light
rail was considered here, but the busway still needs to
accommodate regular buses, so full conversion to steel tracks wasn't.
Possible.
Though tram fans may be disappointed, more cities around
the world are likely to select this kind of system due to its low
cost and flexibility.
Transport advocate Robert Dow sees it as a half solution.
He thinks Brisbane needs a real metro now.
This Brisbane metro plan.
As I said, it's only temporary thing in my view, so it's not going
to work for that long.
It might get us up to the Olympics, maybe, maybe not, but they've got
to really start thinking about.
Some serious rail capacity in the Unicore of Brisbane, and we're
talking, we're talking subways.
He thinks Brisbane could triple its current public transport
journey share of 10% with a single integrated Transit Authority, more
rapid services and better bus connections to the train stations.
I think we can get to 3040% right.
If we do what we need to do right, and we're gonna have to do it, we
can't keep using cars in the way that we've been using them, right?
To allow that change to happen, we've got to get the public
transport network right, right.
Which gets back to having a proper authority doing the things
that are fundamental.
Frequent.
It connected, accessible.
As simple as that.
With its low frequency buses and distant train stations, you can
really understand why people in Brisbane prefer to get
around by car.
The upgrades coming in time for the Olympics, like the trackless
tram and the underground train line, will help visitors get around
without a problem, but residents will be hoping that those kind of
expansionary projects won't end with the games transport in
Brisbane, Meanjin is accelerating after decades in the slow lane
other cities trying to transition.
Away from cars can learn from its experiments, and with the
Olympics and Paralympics on the way, the world will be watching to
see if Brisbane can get its public transport back on track.