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| Brisbane City Hall - Incompetence Towers! |
The good:
- 109 and 66 merged (as per TransLink's review).
- 199 routed full-time via Ivory Street (as per TransLink's review).
The mediocre:
- Maroon CityGlider (AKA SillyGlider, Campbell's PorkBarrelGlider) will have a stop added at Bardon Shops, which should never have been missed out in the first place.
- 161 now stops at SE Busway stations making it marginally more useful. However, this just adds to number of bus routes that commuters have to remember when travelling to/from SE Busway stations.
- 198 reduced in frequency due to low patronage, but to 50 minute intervals. Why not 60 minutes, so that passengers can at least remember the timetable!
- 369 truncated to Toombul, and 590 extended from Airport DFO to Toombul. But the 369 is still is an air carrying waste of tax-payers money.
- P88 dropped, but part replaced by peak P163. Will the 111 and 444 thus have capacity increases?
- 77 cut back to hourly off-peak, when it should just be canned.
The ugly:
- Very few improvements. TransLink's canned network review had cuts, but also plenty of improvements (especially high frequency services). BCC's review appears to be 99% cuts.
- Lack of City Stop consolidation. This was one of the best things in TransLink's review. It appears that City Stop locations will continue to be a confusing and illogical mess.
- Lack of move towards efficient trunk and feeder network (including feeding rail), which TransLink's review was moving towards. In fact, even some feeder bus routes for the high frequency Ferny Grove Line have had services will be cut by BCC.
- No high frequency bus services to Centenary Suburbs, Northern Suburbs, Yeronga, Wynnum Road, Webster Road - these were all planned to be served by high frequency routes in TransLink's network review. Commuters in these areas should be pretty annoyed at BCC's neglect.
- No major reduction to bus congestion through Cultural Centre. TransLink's review planned to reduce congestion by around 25%.
- No consolidation of bus route numbers on the same corridor. TransLink's review managed to consolidate routes on many corridors. Very confusing for passengers!
- Very poor feedback form - quite obviously trying to avoid anyone with common sense providing sensible feedback.
- Cuts to the 379/380/381 which serve Campbell Newman's Ashgrove electorate - doh!
As expected, the review is hugely disappointing, and BCC's politicians and planners should be completely ashamed of themselves. Brisbane's bus network will continue to be inefficient, confusing to use, and wasteful of taxpayers money. It's time that BCC admit that their bus network is well and truly broken, and hand the bus network review back to TransLink.
BCC's Bus Network Review:
http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/traffic-transport/public-transport/buses/bus-network-review/index.htm
Previous BrizCommuter posts on TransLink's network review:
What a joke!
ReplyDeleteThis is an absolute disaster for Brisbane's public transport network!
ReplyDeleteWe can now see why BCC were against the original review. They did not want to be associated with something that might have approached revolutionary. Instead all we get are cuts and changes around the edges.
ReplyDeleteLooked through most of the changes. The changes to the 379-381 inclusive are a disgrace and really do show that the person who wrote the summary has no idea of The Gap area.
The deviations west of Payne Road are not 'minor' at all. They are significant differences and a person can not just catch another bus to access the other route.
Also, as someone who catches those buses during the day at least once or twice a week, I can assure BCC that the services are not under-utilised. In fact the services usually run late because of high demand for the middle of the day (bus 3/4 full).
Cutting the service to 1 hour frequency is a disaster. At the moment at least there is a 15 min frequency between Normanby and Payne Road, now it will be 30 mins.
There is no alternative bus to catch as the 385 goes via Coopers Camp road and Bardon to the city.
I strongly do not share BzC's opinion on the 77. In fact I think it should be better promoted/advertised and explained about the connection possibilities. That being said, 1 hr frequency is just ridiculous.
BCC are showing once again that they have learnt nothing. Can someone list a service that is 1 hour frequency that has high patronage? I believe that if a service is 1 hour frequency, it will always be a low demand service because a customer ;) can not rely on that bus service. What happens if it does not turn up? A customer can be stuck at a remote bus stop for two hours.
I like the change to 310, now via Airport link, but surely it is the 315 that should have been changed. The 315 goes to Redcliffe, so taking time out of that route would seem more important.
P88- P163: One of the major points of the 88 is that it went via Captain Cook Bridge to KGS. Will 163 do the same?
369- We can only hope that the 369 30 min frequencies will be aligned with the train services to/from Ferny Grove.
362- I wish BCC had adopted the changes proposed by translink. The 362 is too infrequent and is another via everywhere service that helps very few.
I personally feel that canning the P88 is a bad idea, You have a high frequency bus service that many people on the SEB use, as well as in Milton(from my experience). Why not scrap the 77? It runs nearly empty even during peak; It is heavily duplicated. I think that they are keeping the 77 just to advertise the tunnel they built?
ReplyDeleteNo there Is ACTUALLY people who get it e.g. Me I Get it at least 7 times a day (it's just the job I do) it saves me 4 hours instead of going into the city and getting lost
DeleteHopefully BzC will re-post this to the September section as it now applies in September as well. Next stage of public transport Brisbane changes announced for Oct 14.
ReplyDeleteWhat a screw job. Almost everything is worse where major changes have been done, but the one that gets my goat is that in their infinite wisdom, they have decided to add a Maroon Glider stop in Bardon, sounds great right, able to connect to 375 and 385 at the express white stop 15 right.
Wrong!!!!
They have decided to locate the Maroon Glider stop at Stop 14, which is down near the Latrobe Terrace roundabout.
I rang up and complained bitterly about this plan as it is patently ridiculous.
Once again BCC can not even get a simple thing right like making the Maroon Glider and the city express stop the same for easy connection.
BCC take a simple idea and screws up the whole point of adding the Bardon stop. Ease of connection to the 385.
It is enough to go and buy a car and battle the roads.
translink service is seriously getting way worst.
ReplyDelete