Sunday, April 15, 2018

A "SHIT" week due for Brisbane commuters

With the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games (GC2018) drawing to a close, Brisbane commuters are still in for yet another week of commuting misery. Due to Queensland Rail's (QR) ongoing lack of driver induced #RailFail, QR will be running a School Holiday Interim Timetable (SHIT) during the working week after GC2018 has finished. Previous iterations of the SHIT have not gone down well with commuters, with lengthened commutes and overcrowding on some services. This time from Tuesday 17th April (inclusive) to Friday 20th April, it is not the school holidays anymore. Thus a full compliment of commuters will be using QR's CityTrain network, whilst the reduced service SHIT is in operation. So what are the issues with QR's SHIT?
  • Peak services reduced by up to 60% - this will result in overcrowding and possibly full trains on most train lines. 
  • Peak express services eliminated - reduced am peak, and no pm peak express services on the Ipswich and Cleveland Lines will significantly lengthen commutes, already affected by reduced frequency. 
  • Off-peak service reduced by up to 50% - off-peak trains every 30 minutes - worse than all other cities in Oceania. 
  • Broken bus connections - due to services reductions, and different clock face times, bus connections will be broken. 
  • Commuters still being charged peak fares for a heavily reduced peak train service. Can commuters launch a class action against TransLink?
Unfortunately, QR's #RailFail is still causing severe pain for Brisbane and SE Queensland commuters. Given that both QR and the next to useless CityTrain Response Unit refuse to mention when it will be resolved (originally stated at early 2019), expect years of pain to continue. The ongoing mess can be blamed on QR and Department of Transport and Main Roads for lack of competent forward planning, as well as political and union interference. At a time when GC2018 has shown that high frequency public transport on the Gold Coast can be successful, QR's inability to offer this to commuters for years to come makes its future look very bleak. 

1 comment:

  1. Any disaster has more than one cause, and as poor as a situation this is, it is unproductive to simply get angry about the situation. That's why I come here. You provide insights as to what is the underlying causes, are what are the outcomes are, what are the probable issues in the future (with Casandra like accuracy), and what could be done to address the system.

    ReplyDelete

All comments are reviewed before being published, and it may take a few days for comments to appear. If comments do not add to the conversation, or are just plain stupid, they will not be published.