Legacy of Failure

Westbound tunnel - no buses planned

When Brisbane's Legacy Way was first announced, then Lord Mayor Campbell Newman announced that it would be used by up to 2000 express buses per day. Unfortunately due to typical Queensland political incompetence (seemingly involving the previous Labor State Government), the direct connections between Legacy Way and the Inner Northern Busway at Kelvin Grove were never constructed.

In a desperate attempt to make some use of Legacy Way for buses, Lord Mayor (and bus network failure denier) Graham Quirk announced that Route P443 would use Legacy Way for a three month trial. This routing started from Monday 29th June. Unfortunately, due to the lack of direct Legacy Way to Inner Northern Busway connection, the inbound route P443 bus has to:

1. Exit Legacy Way onto the Inner City Bypass
2. Travel outbound (yes, outbound) on the Inner City bypass for a kilometre
3. Exit the Inner City Bypass onto a congested slip road at Herston
4. Negotiate a junction and some traffic lights
5. Travel one and half kilometres inbound along the Inner Northern Busway to get back to where is passes the Legacy Way portal

This laughably indirect routing means that there are likely to be only a couple of minutes time savings based on the timetabled 23 minutes from Chapel Hill to Roma Street via Coronation Drive. At least reliability should hopefully be better via the tunnel! Opportunities of adding stops at QUT Kelvin Grove for students travelling in from Western suburbs have been missed, as the re-routed P443 will not stop at any Inner Northern Busway stops until Roma Street.

The re-routing of the route P443 will also only occur for inbound am peak journeys. This is because an outbound pm peak journey connecting between the Inner Northern Busway and Legacy Way would involve an even more out of the way detour via the spaghetti junction at Bowen Hills/Windsor. Thus it is faster to use the existing outbound route via the congested Coronation Drive.

Interestingly Translink have so far failed to produce a timetable showing the new route, or new arrival times in the CBD for the re-routed P443 bus. Whether this is due to lack of time since the announcement, or just laziness, is unknown.

The failure to construct a direct connection between Legacy Way and the Inner Northern Busway has resulted in just 7 express buses per day instead of the originally envisaged 2000 express buses per day using Legacy Way. A great opportunity to improved public transport journey times from the Western and Centenary suburbs has been missed. This has to be high up the list of epic Queensland public transport failures, a list that is sadly very very long.

TransLink notice:
http://translink.com.au/travel-information/service-notices/51176/details