u/Gazza_s_89

Translink SEQ stretches from Gympie to Tweed Heads. 230km

So I reckon for Central Queenslands 160k residents you could do a 110km long "Mini Translink" .

To get the plan to work:

-Allocate a two Next Generation trains from the current order to operate between Gladstone and Rockhampton.

-Finally get trains off Dennison Street, and deviate the rail line along the ring road, and shift the main station and coach hup of Rockhampton next to the airport.

-Where the line rejoins near Yeppoon Rd, build a park n ride station there to allow Yeppoon residents a conveinent place to ditch the car.

-Give both cities 2 or 3 new trunk bus routes, and build "Bus Station" style stops with illuminated lighting and essentially do a "Pretend" BRT system where the main destinations are at least visible and look civilised with nice shelters and electronic signs. Think like the one at Logan Central Kmart.

-Also run regular coach services between Rockhampton and Yepoon and Tannum/Boyne and Gladstone.

Then brand the total system "Translink Central Queensland".

I've actually been using it pretty much every weekend since it opened to Burleigh Heads and this is insane.

On one trip, I heard at least three different sets of people start singing.

Particularly at Surfers Paradise both platforms are jammed full almost continuously, when the tram comes in about 60% get off and it just refills with a different set of people.

Trams drop back to every 15 minutes after 10:00 p.m. I think that needs to be bumped up to every 10 minutes at this point.

A rainy night last night, but the tram is pumping and the critics have been categorically proven wrong.

So the LNP only want to do BRT but of course they are obsessed with Brisbane so they all get these gold plated tunneled busways with glass stations and lifts, when we could be doing cheap ass suburban busways with maybe 4-5 2 lane bridges to make them work, but otherwhise its just a simple 2 lane concrete road, and the stations just have lightweight canopies like the Gold Coast tram where it is just a modular design. No lifts. No Glass.

I think given Helensvale is the busiest train station, we should to a busway that follows the last bit of the Gold Coast highway, new M1 Flyover (Deal with it) and then it just runs along the verge of entertainment drive.

Pacific Pines gets a token busway station near the edge, but honestly for those huge masterplanned cookie cutter estates if you just had a good shared pathway and e-bike and scooter parking I think residents would make an excuse to use it.

The busway wouldn't go into the Movie World car park, you would just have to walk along the current footpath next to the Hypercoaster. (Deal With it)

Michigan Drive roundabout gets upgraded to traffic lights with a special phase for buses to pass straight through the middle. (Deal With it)

And then Oxenford Shops get a stop, I mean come on guys it has a Kmart, Aldi, Woolies, Bunnings, JB Higi and even a little main street yet people forget that it exists and could definitely be nicer.

At this point the Busway splits. One branch shoots across Saltwater Creek and into Hope Island Station. This means you have a way of terminating buses early during the Theme Park Peak hour, and also offer a quicker rail connection from the North.

The other Branch essentially slices straight through Upper Coomera by following the power transmission corridor. In effect the squiggly streets of cul de sac hell that make buses slow and shit no longer become an issue because the main bus follows a straight line.

Then you'd need to do bus lanes early through Coomera City, another Bridge over the M1, and then around Coomera the Busway does a little loop of the main destinations....Hospital/Station+Westfield/Coomera Indoor Stadium/Dreamworld.

Cool so now a car hell section of the Gold Coast that has sprouted along the M1 gets a lifeline, and all the theme parks now show up on the main "network map" of SEQ, so tourists use it too.

I had to visit a friend in hospital the other day and got the tram to GCUH for the first time in a while.

(I used to use it when stage 2 didn't exist and you had to get the bus either from Helensvale)

Now at the time when they built it, it was a bit of an indulgence because it was the only part of the system that went underground and had a station with escalators.

Holy crap!

I was amazed.... literally hundreds of people were in there.

You can see that the extra money was warranted.

Anyhow, you wonder of the business case could be made to do something crazy and put Cavill Avenue station underground and have direct underground connection to the surrounding shopping centres.

Ditto, at Broadbeach South I reckon there is no reason not to pony up and put the tram on an elevated section with a skywalk travelator system connecting Pac Fair / Star / Oasis

Then have a bus station below.

Consultation on the station upgrade is open:
https://www.yoursay-projects.tmr.qld.gov.au/logan-and-gold-coast-faster-rail/holmview-station-precinct

Personally I think upgrading it is a waste of time. Might have made sense when the cattle siding was more active. But now it basically serves a tiny number of residents, factories, but mostly flood plain, so the patronage is in the toilet. It wont get TOD due to the flood risk.

Any why would you use it when its a tiny bit further to just use the new Beenleigh station where you get express trains?

The final way I judge this station. If you were designing the rail line today, there is no way in hell any planner would put the station there.

There's a great saying I love: "Be ready to kill your darlings" and I think at this point SEQ needs to grow up a bit and be willing to not only redesign the bus network, but the rail network when it makes sense to.

I visited Finland (From Australia) back in 2022 shortly after the world re-opened.
I like Architecture (Too bad Finlandia hall was covered for renovations) and theme parks (Taiga is actually one of the top roller coasters in the world)

Hiring a car was a bit expensive and I thought I would need it to visit some obscure locations, but in reality it was unnecessary and even though I only had about 5 days in Finland it was an exceptionally easy country to get around, I thought the quality of the trains was better than Japan, nicer stations, and surprisingly cheap tickets. Even had a chance to use the new tram system in Tampere and the new Metro extension too. Funny seeing the bright orange trains from that Boomfunk MC "Freestyler" song.

It is well known in theme park circles that a wealth Finnish businessman built his own racetrack and theme park in the middle of nowhere, and it was even possible to get one a train a day that would stop there and be met with a shuttle bus to the park.

Did also get to visit the Aalvar Alto studio and a ferry out to one of the islands for a bit of Finnish outdoors. The first Finn I met was in a sauna on the ferry from Stockholm!

So for fun I occasionally knock up network plans for places that I've visited.
I thought Auckland had a decent little rail system for a city of its size and some good busways filling in the gaps to places not near rail. Quite impressive that SRL is nearly done, as far as I know that would make Auckland the smallest city in Oceania with an underground rail system.

But I think people would be hungry for more and the concept of a cross harbor rail tunnel or airport rail will probably be the next thing people want.

I'm calling this one the "ARCH" Link (Airport Cross Harbor).

Does need a fair bit of tunnelling, but the logic I'm following is that of Sydney or Melbourne in that long runs of tunnelling out in the suburbs are easy to build because the big cost is setting up the tunnelling supply chain.

If you wanted to be a massive tightarse and wanted rail badly enough, the entire section along Te Irirangi Drive from Ormiston to Botany could be done on an elevated viaduct (Melbourne Style).

Regardless you'd need a tunnel from Botany to Glen Innes, and then run parallel to the existing train line.

Then drop into a tunnel and have a 2nd CRL with a run of stations at Waiemata, Wynard Quater and Ponsonby (I feel very strongly that stations perform well in bougie suburbs and am happy K-Road is getting a station, it will go off)

Then go under the harbor and have underground stations at Birkenhead, Glenfield, Rosedale and then one actually in the middle of Albany Town Center and then finally connect with the Busway at Albany.

I've tried to follow the learnings from Sydney and Perth that in low density cities, its better to have stations about 3-4km apart just so you can make the system faster than driving. Yeah you might have to catch a bus 2km to reach the station but once onboard it is VERY quick.
And generally speaking, put the stations at the major shopping centers, because chances are people want to go to these places regardless so the local bus network is already going to be focused around the shopping center.

Then at this point the network becomes very simple.

One line from Swanston to Pukekohe via the CRL.

Then Both the existing Panmure and new airport lines share the the cross harbor tunnel.

And finally you'd relegate Onehunga to New Lynn as a little shuttle.

Final controversial idea is that because the Airport and Panmure lines mostly going to be new track anyway, you could convert and upgrade the old section through Panmure and make the entire ARCH line driverless....

I'm not from Hobart, I'm from Queensland and visit from time to time, but one thing that really struck me is that Hobart is just like a little Oslo or Aalborg, with a lovely historic downtown, beautiful scenery but also not afraid to do some good modern stuff, like that UTAS building in North Hobart, MONA...even the airport renovation is pretty decent for a small city.

So Hobart has about 250k and there are numerous small cities in Europe (Particularly in Denmark, France, Austria and Germany) of that size who have built a dedicated mass transit networks.

The scale is smaller but the underlying principle is the same.

I like to think of it like "doing a line of coke" where you deliberately try and line up many popular destinations on the one corridor, eg universities, stadiums/arenas, major shopping centers, clusters of high density housing / business districts / restaurant precincts / airports / museums on the one line.

So a wide variety of people have a reason to use it and hence bigger vehicles and more frequency and speed/priority, and eventually justify building dedicated infrastructure, purley to save time when bridging between these destinations.

So without going into too much detail, I've tried to do that here.

Now, BRT versus trams, I think there is a case for both, but one captains call I'll make is that it is a waste of time having the trams go the long way around the Domain and miss everyone just because the tracks are there.

South of Moonah they need to run down the guts through New Town and North Hobart where all the good stuff is. This probably means cutting a lane of traffic on Elizabeth st and punching right through to the University in order to get bums on seats to justify the expense of light rail. You can compensate for this by adding a lane on the Brooker Highway to encourage traffic to use that corridor instead.

The whole Sorrel/Airport/Rosny/CBD/Kingston corridor has far too many steep inclines for trams to ever work, and you already have sections of Motorway that could be widened with bus lanes if needed. Sorry, you're probably not getting a rail tunnel under the Derwent any time soon either.

I think the big expense here is doing a new 2 lane Tasman Bridge, purely for walkers/cyclists/buses...Have a look at the Green Bridge built to UQ in Brisbane for how this can be done.

The second thing I'd do is a 2km bus only tunnel from the Stadium to the start of the Southern Outlet. The reality is that if this was a 4 lane road tunnel with exhaust stacks it will cost megabucks. If you relieved the traffic with a 2 lane bus tunnel for electric buses only, its half the diameter and doesn't need such a big exhaust system....Will Hobart be ballsy enough to go a different route and spend the money on a public transport system before a road tunnel and get cars off the road that way?

Now, I'm not a local, so feel free to point out any local nuances I've missed.

Ok so u/Cool-Refrigerator147 asked for me to give my take on how to fix transport in the West.

I'm not gonna explain my thinking too deep, just read the sidebar next to the map, zoom in.(Ill repaste below too)

I think Ipswich is treated kinda shit, and people making fun of the place reinforces the economic stagnation. I dunno, I think better transport out there to "bring it closer" to Brisbane would work, its not acceptable to have a all stops train that takes a full hour as the general offering in 2026 to your nearest satellite city, plus the other attempted satellite at Springfield. Do they want these places to work or nah?

But yeah, I do like one "out there" idea that the Government has never mentioned and see what I can do with it, but basically the guts of the plan is this.

-New express viaduct, from Wacol to Dinmore, cutting through the prison and over the Moggil Peninsular using the abandoned Goodna Bypass corridor, but give public transport to Moggil by having an elevated rail station on the actual viaduct hehe. Will they allow it it? If they did it certainly makes my life easier.

-Extend the Springfield Line in parallel.

-Springfield Line gets full time express from Darra (Remember folks, speed and frequency and stations at popular destinations are all that matters in order to get passengers, don't overcomplicate it)

-So you have Ipswich Trains blitzing it from Dinmore and Springfield trains blitzing it from Darra.
-You still need an all stops train filling in the gaps, and that can start from Dinmore and kinda just cruise along through the old Brisbane River Towns at Dinmore, Goodna

-Because of how the road layout meshes with the train line and the few level crossings, its very efficient to provide a north south grid of busways, metro buses or normal buses to connect the lines and give a wide variety of destinations, eg totally possible to live in Darra and teach in Ripley or work in a shop in Booval. I've put in all the popular bus ideas ive seen on here, so take your pick or change as required, since buses are flexible.

-Dinmore is strategic because its its a motorway junction, and now has this new fangled western express trains, so coaches from Toowoomba can just exit straight off and funnel passengers onto Express trains rather than getting stuck in the Centenary traffic jams and congestion at Roma St coach terminal.

Look we cant give Toowoomba decent trains yet even though any other regional town interstate that close to the capital would. It's a joke that places like Busselton, Bendigo or Bowral have better rail to their capital cities than Toowoomba.

But a first step is to get express trains to Ipswich at least, so regional Queenslanders least the always have the option of joining a "Fast Rail" network at Ipswich to begin with, and go west from there.

SIDEBAR NOTES:

-The Ipswich and Springfield lines are the best performing in the network, with quad tracks from Roma St to Darra allowing Ipswich express trains to efficiently overtake all stops Springfield Trains.

-The express tracks would be extended further west, through a unique plan to run on a dual track "Airtrain" style viaduct from Wacol to Dinmore directly over the floodplain.

-The route would form a new fast Western Express mainline out ofBrisbane, and would utilise the Goodna bypass corrridor, as well as a new viaduct passing over state government prison land at Woolston Park.

-The viaduct over the prison land would be enclosed by precasr concrete sound walls and a mesh "lid" in sensitve areas, similar to the protrective mesh canopy tunnel used to protect the inner northern busway around Victoria Park golf course.

-Because a new viaduct would pass over the Moggil Peninuslar, Moggil would benefit from full time express train access to Brisbane, via a "Hope Island" style elevated station, at Moggil South, near the ferry. This station is of course optional to build.

-A total reroganization of the western rail corridors would occur with three new services.

Western Express: All stations Rosewood or Ipswich to Dinmore, then Express Moggil South>Darra>Indooroopilly>Milton

Ripley Valley Express: All Stations Yamanto to Darra then Express Darra>Indooroopilly>Milton

Dinmore All Stations: All Stations Dinmore to City

-Passengers can switch from all stops to Local trains at Dinmore, Darra and Indooroopilly. Because both branches run express, there is spare seating capacity to provide this level of customer service.

-A new WestGlider upgrade to the 444 bus service would connect Moggil South Station to Kenmore, Indooroopilly, and then via the UQ ring road to connect colleges, sporting facilites and the Brisbane Metro M2 line at UQ Lakes, It would then hook into Toowong Station, connecting with future cross river pedestrian bridges. This would allow West End residents to access the WestGlider too!

-Many metro lines are only short feeder lines connnected to existing rail or metro lines, so a new Centenary Metro ould act as a feeder metro, with its own separate electric bus depot.This would make use of existing freeway bus stops at Fig Tree Pocket, and would include new stations at Jindalee DFO, Mt Ommaney Plaza, Sumner Rd and then finally hook into Darra Station for connections to the Ipswich Express, Dinmore Line, Ripley Valley Express.

-The Springfield line would be quickly extended to a new terminus at Yamanto via Redbank and Ripley , as per current plans, and renamed the Ripley Valley line.

-Ipswich is unique amongst Queensland cities for having a good linear pattern of development along its local train system,

-A new north south Bremer Cross River Busway from Karalee to Yamanto via Riverlink/pswich Central /Hospital/USQ would give Ipswich its own self contained "Mini Metro" system, complemented by local trains from Rosewood to Dinmore.

This would be an upgrade of the current 515 High Frequency bus route.

-Dinmore would be relocated closer to the motorway junction, with a new multi level car park and Asian style Highway Bus terminal. This would allow future Lockyer Highway Bus services from the towns along the Warrego Highway to feed into Western Express trains. These buses could also continue along the Logan Motorway to provide a coach connection to the Gold Coast line at Loganlea.

-The Western Express trains could be extended all the way to Toowoomba, subject to uture government funding for passenger rail upgrades outside of Brisbane.

-One final point I would like to reinforce is that once Cross River Rail changes, then they will switch parings with Gold Coast. In other words, Ipswich trains will no longer go to Nambour, they will go to the airport.
Similarly, Gold Coast trains will no longer go to the Airport, they will go to the new Sunshine Coast line.

Ipswich having a direct airport rail connection is great, especially if it has an extra express track on that. The reality Amberley aint becoming an international airport any time soon, so you could massively improve Ipswich's economic fortunes by reinforcing the international airlink.

So this weekend the rail shutdown means the Gold Coast line is running in the dreaded all stops mode (still only half hourly)

So to get into the city you use the rail buses, but if you are a thinking man you'll get off at Fruitgrove and use the high frequency BUZ150 instead, so now hundreds of people are doing this. We haven't even got to My Graatt and it's standing room only, because it's having to act as a train.

2 casual observations:

-Despite the hot unsheltered hellscape and small graffi covered shelter, passengers are tolerating changing modes purely to save time. This is after lunch on a Sunday, not peak hour. They didn't need years to adapt they did it overnight.

-Man buses don't have much spare capacity as it is.

I can't believe we have such a full bus system yet people act as if doing more rail is a quantum leap and think a slightly longer bus will buy any time.

A couple of weeks ago I came up with my mad scientist plan to sort out traffic on the Southside ( https://www.reddit.com/r/brisbane/comments/1vsebmb/transport_after_2032_on_the_southside_brisbahn/ ), so now it's the Northsides turn to get Gazza'd

I saw a great video the other from a Brisbane trained urban planner day about Zurich (A city smaller than us) and how they did a couple of well placed express tunnels to turn their disjointed rail system into a regional S-Bahn that avoided the need to build any further motorways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cvuthXbTDQ

So how would I fix up the Brisbane Northside network following the Zurich approach.

Now, I'm not saying any of this is gonna be cheap. But we have Labor wanting to do a road tunnel under Gympie Rd so we should be allowed to have the conversation that it could be rail instead.

So we start off with that, a non stop tunnel that dives after crossing pine rivers, runs direct to Chermside, stops once and then direct to Albion and then into Cross River Rail.

As I said in my other post, Cross River Rail is going to be a sleeper hit because it finally directly connects the Sunshine Coast to the Gold Coast, and this will be essential for visitors. The problem is even though Cross River Rail will adress a bottleneck, the central section of this "North-South Mainline" still has far too much rail traffic and too many stations and is too slow, and SEQ really should have at least decently fast north south line, given that's the way the development goes.

So with the long distance trains in the tunnel, this frees up tracks for freight and to run the Redcliffe and Shorncliffe "Bayside" lines at full tilt.

Ferny Grove also gets a lot of extra spare capacity (Since Beenleigh and Gold Coast trains are being taken out of Central and South Brisbane) so we can use that spare capacity to finally build a rail line along the Trouts Rd corridor. Miss me about losing a few trees, motorways are worse and sprawl is worse so building a train along this corridor, with tunnels as needed, is the least bad option. This "Strathpine Line" only needs to run a far as Strathpine to link up with the other lines again.

Now, what about the Northern Busway to Bracken Ridge? Personally I think going to Bracken Ridge is a waste of time, they should just build a train station on Telegraph Rd and because long distance trains are going into Brisbane via tunnel, we can add extra stations to the old line because adding extra stops wont mess up express trains now.

The busway itself should still be finished, but it only needs to go to Chermside and Aspley (As you'd expect) but I'd hook west rather than east after Aspley and link up with the new train line going to Strathpine.

Chermside is the main game, and that now has a train, and you can connect with rail services at Windsor as well, so the buses dont have to carry as many people as forecast, so you can probably get away with BCCs new toys.

We could also use the new Metro electric buses on a "cheapo" orbital busway to connect up all the northside train lines. It would sneak along the edges of parks and golf courses (As was done with the Northern Busway at Herston) or along the edge of Industrial estates, or parallel to main roads, and it could also tackle the steep hills up towards Albany creek, so finally the Northside has a proper distribution of stations in basically every suburb.

Between all this, you'd have your usual BUZ routes and the Great Circle Line upgraded, more cross town buses, so it would make it entirely possible to get anywhere very fast without going via the CBD....

So I'm aware that there has been a proposal kicking around to do a cableway up to Springbrook, much like SkyRail in Cairns.

On the other hand, I know transport to the Spit remains an issue as well.

Anyway, with some free time on a Saturday arvo I came up with this.

I've been to a few places where they run a high clearance cableway over a body of water, like the one to Sentosa Island in Singapore or the one across the Thames in London (Which you can pay to use by tapping the same Oyster card as you do for other transport in London)

I did the one in Busan back in December 2024 and freezed my tits off.

I figure you could do a cableway on the Gold Coast, but put it in a better location, and have it connect to either of the main light rail stops in Southport. There would be a short covered walkway to the cableway terminal and then it would probably take about 5 minutes to go up and over the Broadwater to the Spit to terminal over there, and of course you could have a nice boardwalk linking up all the developments and Sea World, so this would be a quicker shortcut than going down around via a bus or a future tram line.

Some of these systems have fugly towers so I'd want to see a nice white one done like a ship mast. Much like the Sydney Harbors bridge, this could be the Gold Coast's "thing" and you could let off fireworks or lasers or whatever during special events, and even put a flare up there to hold one of the Olympic flames in 2032.

I fully expect some people to hate the idea, but IDK, I miss the days of the GC where there was just more random stuff to do, like the Nobbys chairlift etc.

No I'm not a property developer, I come up with stuff like this for fun.
In my fightback against AI, I've hidden a typo.