Get people on trains. Barely an excuse in some parts of Brisbane. Its not places like that who’ve got to worry though, it’s places like GC where we’ve decided that a light rail system makes sense when just north there’s a great cheaper and faster busway system.
Plus all the people who commute up and down and up and down the m1 day after day. Push them to WFH if possible. Better for people with kids as well and there’s no reason we can’t in a modern world, business just has too much money in real estate to let us.
With due respect, what about the light rail system doesn’t bring people onto trains? To my understanding, it’s a significant driver of positive induced demand and it’s integration with the train system is pretty good
The integration is good but I think it’s poor investment. Busways and lanes are much cheaper to implement and are in general faster than the light rail system. I like the rail to Southport and from Broadbeach in - it works well enough and is much better than the contracted bus system which isn’t very reliable, but the extension to GC airport is ridiculous to travel at 40kmh or less avg speed.
Buses tend to have their drawbacks too, tbf.
For one, they’re less scalable - to increase capacity on a busway, you need more buses, requiring more drivers and more infrastructure including passing lanes. In Brisbane, where issues in this area have resulted in service cancellations, the latter can be crucial. Buses tend to be less efficient owing to rolling resistance - nothing beats steel-on-steel and a pool of motors. Flexibility can be a liability too - for example, service cuts and reductions in service quality are easier to perform with buses. This carries over to infrastructure projects too - for example, the Northern Transitway bus lanes have seen cuts into a rush-hour only system, decreasing effectiveness as a result. And while the light rail is more expensive w.r.t initial investment, the operating costs would be considerably lower. It’s a case of “spend money to make money”, to save in ongoing things like operating costs and energy usage. That said, busways do have some advantages, including insanely high theoretical throughputs (which do come at the costs of higher operating expenses and a need for more vehicles). I am not exactly super clued in to address the speed aspect, though I will argue that speed is merely one factor in service attractiveness (frequency, comfort, permanent infrastructure, separation from road traffic, etc are aspects too, which I argue G:link does well from my rides on the system).
In the end, it all comes down to the needs of the corridor. Buses, trams, and trains all have their niches, which they each fulfill well in certain contexts. For the corridor, a linear, populous area with lots of patronage and a need for a permanent right-of-way with good presence in the urban area, I’d argue that the light rail does the job well. Brisbane’s busways, which were designed to service low-density car-centric suburbia in a commuter role, do well in that environment too. But that’s my 5 cents
Very true, operating costs would be much higher with a busways system, and the sprawl of Brisbane works much better than in gc where there’s a lot of people close enough to the light rail for it to be useful. I should put more thought into the topic. Still very doubtful re: the extension to gold coast airport.