…except to reflect on the benefits of living in a remote area, the nearest thing i have to Public Transport is the buses my employer provide to convey us to work.

the lack of traffic, noise, pollution, public transport etc is one of the huge benefits of remote living – and the resultant lack of stress is often overlooked as a tangible benefit.

One of the key issues facing transport delays is dwell-times at stations – that is, the time taken to unload and load passengers before moving onto the next stop (ref: CM Online, 8/2/09). Quite simply, it takes too long to transfer passengers at stations out the two doors available on each platform. For many passengers it is difficult to access these doors from half way down the carriage, let alone forcing two entire carriages out a single pair of doors. It is unworkable!

As you mentioned, Taezar – battling parking around stations by implementing more park’n'ride is akin to battling obesity by punching more holes in the belt. It induces demand to drive to the station because of the availability of the spaces, rather than forcing people to seek alternatives due to the lack of spaces. A successful transport network is one where the respective modes do what they’re best at. Trains for high capacity, high-speed, clear-running trunk routes – busses for low distance, medium-capacity feeder routes to the trunks such as Busways or Railways. If busses did not have to traverse the congested arteries to the city where Busways don’t exist, they could spend their time providing a high-frequency local feeder service using the existing number of busses.

Of course, this would require a vast investment in increasing the frequencies of the rail network, an investment in the form of entire, self-powered trains which can provide additional services to cater for the increasing demand. The LNP’s policy of butchering our current orders to form these 7-car abominations will only further hamstring any chance of QR running decent frequencies on its lines – and if the frequencies are still laughable, the installation of ATP on the network will be a useless investment.

Same point applies to the gateway bridge duplication and gateway arterial upgrade project, and the Ipswich Motorway upgrades.. All great projects in their own right, and certainly supporting the growth of the arterial network – however, consider the recent urban growth in the north, south and west of brisbane and adjacent LG’s (which has been long predicted and forecast), and yet these key pieces in the regional road network, which support commuters and more importantly inter-regional freight movements, should have been be started so that they were finished at least by last year to allow movement of what is currently choking our arterials.

Perhaps people should go back and read what was proposed in the 2007 Transport Vision for SEQ, which was a Queensland Transport document prepared in 2000 under the Beattie Govt.. It is interesting to see how much of what it proposed has and has not been delivered.

Will change for changes sake change this approach of ‘catch-up’ infrastructure investment. The lack of anything solid from the LNP means that I’m not sure. What are my other options again??