No one would every accuse the LNP leader Lawrence “the Borg” Springborg of being poll driven, would they? I mean… surely it’s a coincidence that the latest Galaxy Poll on state voting intentions found Labor leading strongest on transport and the LNP releasing a transport policy for Brisbane commuters the same day?
The said policy is an amalgam of the undercosted, weird (extra carriages on trains which won’t fit on the station) and possibly unfeasible, according to the government. But in the grand tradition of governments, Labor are claiming they were already thinking of the most apparently popular bit of the Borg’s train agenda, and may well steal it, but they wouldn’t be doing that because they were already… etc. The neatness of this trick is that the government can actually do something about what the opposition can only talk about, and at the same time it provides some dangerous incentives for the LNP to remain a policy free zone.
But, leaving aside the politics for a moment, The Borg’s initative is to have free fares for early and late commuters heading to and from the CBD by rail – from 6am to 7am and from 6pm to 7pm. The idea – supposed to reduce overcrowding on peak hour trains – is said to have been borrowed from a Melbourne iniative, which is what Labor are now saying they’ve been looking at for some time. Any Melbs folks care to tell us Quincelanders how it’s worked out in practice?
Getting back to the politics, Springborg combined his announcement with the launch of his own new form of transport – a campaign bus called “The Borg Express”. The visuals suggest part of his problem – the very self-centred (or if you prefer, leadership focused) nature of his campaign. I haven’t seen any qualitative polling on this, but I’d strongly suspect the LNP doesn’t have much of a brand, and the worst of both the Libs and the Nats might be haunting its image. The Borg has a lot riding on his own self-presentation, and the LNP must be hoping all the eggs in this particular basket don’t break as The Borg Express wends its way around.
In Melbun it’s rubbish – the free fare (not “fair”, BTW) only applies to people with certain types of tickets, and there are irritating caveats about late, delayed and cancelled trains that only a bureaucrat could understand. There’s no evening “free” period either. One problem is that buying the required ticket and missing one free trip but buying a single-day ticket to replace it eliminates the saving. One fine for getting it wrong and you lose a years savings. Unsurprisingly very few people have taken up this offer. So it’s more of a headline than a solution.
To work it would have to actually be free, and the penalties for late/delayed/cancelled rains would have to apply to Connex, not to the traveller. Something like “pick your ticket from the machine, price=free, validate ticket, travel. If at the end of your journey it turns out you need to pay, pay the required fare”.
It ties into the Australian punitive approach to misunderstood fares. Most asian countries have ticket dispensers *inside* the controlled area so you can buy your way out (including paying the difference if you have the wrong ticket). Here, you just have to approach the staff and take your chances… get waved through or get a $200 fine… which will it be?
It has failed in practice, Mark – there was a very damning evaluation recently. Incidentally, an Age survey found 60+% of Melbournites think the VIC govt too road-focussed, and completely crap on public transport issues.
It not rocket science this public transport lark. Just zip over to Hong Kong and travel about on the MTR underground. They have “Go” cards (called “Octopus”) that actually work all the time in trains (Underground) trams, busses, ferries and shops, fares are really cheap. You load the card up with some money and you pay before you go by swiping the card at the turnstile. You can also buy a card that gets you to a specified destination; used by school-kids mostly, so Mum ad Dad know where they are. Simple efficient and low cost. It is amazingly fucking excellent.
Roads? Well they have them but only the rich and the bus companies use them.
Huggy
Singapore MRT underground is damn good too, precise, inexpensive, rechargeable cards and as you grab it a little display shows how much value still remains.
Special fares made little difference in Melb, report came out just a few days ago. Free fairs? Fun fairs?? – worth a try Mr Borg.
Didn’t they try to put the focus on The Borg before (a vague image is coming into my mind of The Borg in a towel doing the ironing)? The bus does look kind of snazzy and modern.
Off-topic but still about transport, in Melbourne we have just had former State Liberal leader become the new lord mayor. He wants to open up Swanston Street once again for cars. Grrrrrr.
Yep Huggy, and its got to the point that the the pro-road stance its just a pure bloody-minded habit. Not even entrenched interests want more roads. The only thing that will make life better for motorists/ truckers etc is improved public transport reducing traffic – and the Royal Auto Associations know it, and openly say it too.
So, where is Planet ’state ALP transport policy’, anyway? Its not in this friggin galaxy, thats fer sure. The most irritating feature of it all is that while these planners defying the most basic practical common sense, they retain this near unshakeable belief in their own alleged “pragmatism”.
Its beyond conservatism: its actually a form of political autism.
On what platform was the demented Doyle elected?
I thought Melbourne was a bit more savvy than that?
Cracking down on crime in the city and opening up Swanston Street are the two I can recall.
I understand that Stephen Mayne got elected for something as well (after running three million times).
Of course, the Melbourne thing may have been a schemozzle but that doesn’t mean in principle Queensland Transport and QR couldn’t design something that works – learning from mistakes made in another jurisdiction – and (again in theory) it should be easier to do that since QR is publicly owned and there’s no private corporate operator in the middle (if that’s still the case in Melbs?)… and Lefty E, I wouldn’t necessarily tar the Bligh gov’t with the Brumby brush – a lot of the tunnel nonsense is down to Campbell Newman. The state gov’t is (belatedly) doing some good things – as with the inner north busway and its extensions. Still much short of ideal though.
Darlene – it’s funny you should say that about the Borg. When we were doing focus groups before the 06 election, people struggled to come up with any positives other than “he looks good without his shirt on”. I’m unconvinced that his relaunch will be enough to overcome existing negative perceptions of a two time National loser. And, just quietly, The Borg isn’t that bright a spark. But we’ll see.
Mark, The very first thing we could do in Bris is synchronise the traffic lights. Then get the card working. Then get those diesel busses changed over to LNG. Then maybe put light rail cars on the rail network and increase the frequency and speed. But ’struth that would take intelligence, perseverance and money. This is Queensland mate.
Huggy.
I was primarily ranting about VIC, Mark – though I do think it applies more or less equally across the states, to be perfectly honest. QLd is certainly improving, yes – but thats a catch-up effort, from a long, long way behind.
And yes, Kennet’s Connex is a big part of the problem. These guys dont really “run” rail services at all – they just appear to screw them up, then collect profits. Any time anything needs fixing or upgrading the state govt forks out.
So, like most most privatization disasters – its a ‘user pays twice’ system. Fares go up, and the amount of taxpayers money doesn’t ever drop accordingly. Im not sure Connex has ever put any of its own money into rail infrastructure of any sort.
The Borg Express is powered by biofuels apparently, 100% pure Southern Downs bullshit.
Same card in Brisbane already. It works well.
LOL @ Borg.
Transport solutions in Brisbane will cost a motza to fix. The need to add buss routes that are not all on the trunk lines. And like all Australian cities, an city-wide underground metro is way overdue.
Tyro, yep on both counts. Though to be fair there are a few bus routes that aren’t on the trunk line on the Northside I’m familiar with which work well, but there need to be more. The green bridge @ St Lucia and the linkage out there as well as between the inner north and southside busway and Roma St station are all good things in my own experience.
I haven’t got myself a Go Card yet but I’ve heard from friends it works pretty well. Good to read of some ticketing options to be built into it as well.
Somebody call the Japanese in. They may be from space, but they’ll damn well fix your public transport problems.
Mark
Re: the bus routes, in my experience getting from inner west to south brisbane for example is a fscking nightmare. the only bus that goes there is the 444 moggill buz and it only runs along coro drive. There’s nothing on Milton Rd. Oh except if I want to go to Tenerife then it’s just the one bus. On the train from south bris to auchenflower station it’s three stops and one change and 40 minutes even in peak hour. I just walk over the Vic bridge to/from the city it’s the only real option and gives me my daily exercise.
I note however that for tomorrow night I can walk out my office door 30m to the bus stop and get a 199 all the way to the valley.
Part of the issue with the inner west also is all the bullshit freeway work. I mean what retard designed the inner city bypass to SE freeway junction so they don’t join up without a big messy traffic merge on Coro drive? They are insane. It is a half-arsed mess. And now they are building another half arsed mess with that stupid hale st link which only transports the problem 100 metres across the river and builds a bridge where there already is one! Not to mention the northern link, which on the Toowong end, is a monster set of eight lane feeder roads just chopping down half of the back of Toowong. Both Can-Do Campbell initiatives I gather and telling of the sort of disaster the LNP will visit on us from state government.
Also as far as I can see that new footbridge going across on the east side of the Grey St Bridge from the city to the art gallery, what point is that if it doesn’t connect to the bicentennial bikeway? What did the beaks in the court complex want their own personal foot bridge to the art gallery for after adjournment? Is that it? It’s also not like there are no other bridges that can take foot and bike traffic in the area! Just another big chunk of ill-thought civil engineering. Looks impressive I guess.
Tyro, I was under the impression that the Tank St Bridge would have connecting ramps to the Bicentennial Bikeway. The big problems with CBD bridges for cyclists in that area are that the Grey St Bridge doesn’t connect to the Bicentennial and the bike lane shoves you up on to the footpath, the Victoria Bridge forces you to choose between sharing with pedestrians or traffic and the Captain Cook Bridge has no cycling facilities at all, necessating a round-about trip from the Goodwill Bridge to the SE Freeway bikeway.
Newman wants to introduce a bike sharing scheme but there’s not really anywhere to ride them. If he’s going to build the NSBT we need a congestion zone in the CBD with some separated (Copenhagen) bike lanes to make riding safe.
The thing that shits me the most about the LNP? There doesn’t seem to anyone bright enough to whisper in the Borg’s ear: “The metro’s a goer.” Instead, we get farting around with the uncosted and underwhelming free off-peak fares. And extra carriages on trains? Which bright spark thought of that? Obviously not someone that rides the trains, because even Brisbane Central can only take 6 at a time.
Seriously – if there are any LibNat apparatchiks reading this (and there must be some), spruik up for the Brisbane underground. Propose it, cost it, and build the fucking thing. It’s probably the only thing at this point that would result in a LNP landslide. I‘d vote for it. And for the love of god, don’t make it a PPP!
Tyro Rex @ 16 – western suburbs public transport problems are absolutely endemic, and most attempts to fix them have been quick fixes and basically sucked. It’s actually one of the big reasons I moved from St Lucia to New Farm in 02!
Thanks Tyro.
Sorry, didn’t realise Brisbane already has The Card. (My Singapore sampling was from 1994, forsooth.) Melbourne, as so often, lags behind. Vic Govt hasn’t yet got The Card working. Blames the contractors.
But such inconvenient facts would never prevent a Melburnian feeling smug and superior, esp towards Brisbane; that’s something we specialise in. Plus ca change.
Sam, after looking at the drawings it does look like it’s got a long ramp that comes up to it from the eastern side only. It connects to the ramp about 160meters east of it (to the old part under the freeway, not the over-river walkway). The documentation seems to imply the whole bridge’s purpose to make a “loop” with Goodwill Bridge, not actually really solve anyone’s foot or bike transport needs. Although it might do that, a bit, I guess.
I don’t disagree with the overall analysis, but it’s not actually as complicated as that.
You need to get a ticket for the free fare, but the ticket is actually free (and is a 10×2hr ticket, so allows 10 journeys.)
The ticket covers trips that are scheduled to arrive by 7am, and allowances are made for delayed services, but not for cancelled services.
There was some unfortunate publicity recently when just before 7am some Inspectors got on a train which had in fact been delayed and started hassling people with free fare tickets, but it seems that they were wrong – not that that is any comfort to said hassled passengers.
Perth has the card system too – a few teething problems at first, but it works really well now. I think it’d be easier to get a free-fare hour going with a card system. Set the machines to charge $0.00 if the card is swiped between 6am-7am, etc.
In principle off-peak pricing on public transport is a great idea, but if you don’t have the systems to implement it, i.e. The Card, then it’s not going to be user friendly enough.
I like the convenience of my monthly ticket where I don’t have to worry about whether I have the right kind of ticket or not.
It also doesn’t seem to have made any discernible difference to crowds on the regular peak hour trains
I was always under the impression that this was only meant to be a stop gap – that the intention was always to link to cross the river into South Brisbane – why do you think they’ve been constantly messing with the flows along Grey, Merivale and Cordelia Streets?
I recall, gads – this was maybe 10 years ago when we last lived in Brissy – they were dumping rock into the river right in front of the Hale St/Coro Drive intersection in preparation for establishing head works for the bridge. Then all hell broke loose because the Sth Brissy folks realised they were about to have a freeway pushed through their burb and it came to a halt.
My gripe is why they’ve NEVER opened up the Ekka loop to commuters? Not only could it have serviced the RBH more efficiently, but an extra stop behind Spring Hill would’ve been mildly successful as well.
Of course, you still have it good compared with the rest of us. Up here in Hicksville, we have an extensive rail network pointing out in every direction (South, West and North) from the CBD yet not a commuter train to be seen. All made worse by pollies of all persuations thinking it remarkably smart to close our station, which is all of 100m from the CBD, and relocating it to the fringe of the town.
But Mr Barnett finds it difficult to just that, thus justifying delaying his pre-election promise to give Seniors and Disability Pensioners free travel between 10am-3pm and all weekend.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/25/2429127.htm
Frank,
Colin could just have been assuming Carpenter had been telling the truth in his promise that they could deliver it. It should have been a reasonably safe assumption as they were the ones in a position to know.
But of course, Saint Carps would never lie, would he?
Well, I don’t know. All they ever needed to do was to make an under or over pass that smoothly joined the bottom of the inner city bypass with the start of the S.E. freeway only 100 metres away, at the time they made it. The merging and de-merging with all the Coro drive traffic is what causes the congestion. A bridge across the river solves practically nothing.
As it is, living in the Brisbane inner-west, even travelling by *car* is a pain in the arse, especially when that over-egged fiddle playing Andre fucking Rieu is laying some steaming pile of poop in Lang Park this evening. Causing a massive fucking traffic jam, when I left work late with a stinking headache in a taxi (sorry Mark that’s why I didn’t make it to your PhD drinks). In the traffic jam on Milton Rd, some tool in a Lexus asked the taxi driver where “a great place to park” was!!! I mean, fuck these people.
But all that might be the codeine in the Nurofen Plus talking.
Re Hong Kong’s MTRC trains: the doors were bult in Narre Warren (Vic) by a German-owned company, shipped to Korea for adding to the trains that now operate in Hong Kong. And I wrote the installation and maintenance manuals. Isn’t this gloabalised economy fun?
Lefty E at 15: Connex being at least part French-owned, surprisingly has contracted with the similarly French-owned Alstom to build and manage its rail infrastructure. Which means all its rolling stock happens to be built in France.
I don’t know if the two companies are actually corporately linked, or if they are just joint ventures. I’m sure that both being French is merely coincidental.
The other set of Melbourne rolling stock (since the privatisations) was for the M trains (Bayside, subsequently departed) and their part of the network taken over by Connex. As per my previous post about writing manuals for Hong Kong’s MTRC, the same Narre Warren based company built the doors for the M trains that were built by Siemens (either in Bavaria or Austria, can’t remember which built the trains cos my client was also building similar doors for whatever the other Tram company (also departed) was).
Couple of interesting (or ranty) points:
1. when Jeffrey privatised the metropolitan railway and tram networks, the successful bidders were required to build new rolling stock. There was NO provision for local content of any sort in the contracts. The winning consortia originally planned to build their tram and train rolling stock in their home countries, either by Alstom or Siemens (spelt France and Germany/Austria). It was only after Bracks gained government that local content became an issue, which is how I ended up writing manuals for the Siemens rolling stock. (ie, if you push the button and the door pops out before it slides, I wrote its manuals).
2. I’d really like to find out whose bright idea it was to split BOTH the rail and tram networks in Melbourne into 2 entities (total of 4 different operators, originally). Just like gas, water, electricity, etc how can a “competitive element” exist when you essentially have monopolies, one handling east-west transport and the other handling north-south, for each of trams and trains? Surprisingly, it didn’t work.
3. Just by bad luck, I suppose, I’d already gone through a similarly ill-thought out privatisation: what was once Government Aircraft Factories – builders of Nomad, F/A-18, Jindivik and assorted parts for every Boeing, Airbus and Fokker aircraft you’ve ever flown in (apart from you ex B-17/B-29 jockeys) – was privatised as AeroSpace Technologies of Australia. Reason for privatisation – anything GAF built involved subsidy (partly because our owner – Defence, mainly the RAAF – told us how much we could charge for anything we built for our customers (spelt RAAF), and any difference invariably ended up as subsidy. (There were also other inefficiencies, but nothing that good management could not have fixed). Anyway, if any word is bound to get front page treatment in an anti-PS/govt paper it is subsidy. No matter that the end result is ACTUAL cost.
Solution: corporatise the company so it could charge actual cost plus profit. This was supposed to result in savings to government, but the fatal flaw was evident: PLUS PROFIT(originally 15%).
Anyway, the next decision was to fully privatise the company – enter Rockwell Aviation – and an absolute bargain was made. Subsequently, and for other reasons, Rockwell folded, to be acquired by Boeing. End result, virtually the entire Australian aerospace industry ended up, at bargain basement (and B3, not B1) prices. And still the money the RAAF etc has to pay for their purchases has only gone up. Because everything is now ACTUAL cost PLUS profit (whatever Boeing wants to charge – who else is on hand to build the stuff?)
4 Why would British Airways (virtually bankrupt) want to merge with Qantas (one of the most profitable airlines on Earth)? Of course, it’s all back to the glory days of Imperial Airways/Qantas Imperial Airways of course. Couldn’t be any other reason, surely?
Err, couple = 4 is my dairy farm upbringing. Whenever my Dad asked me to get a couple of nails, or a couple of anything, it ALWAYS meant at least 3. My kids grew up with the same arithmetic.
Or if you’re Italian, its like the Joe Avati Joke about the Nonna sending her Grandson to bring in “Due Patati” (2 Potatoes), and the Grandson dutifully brings in 2, when she really meant 8, and thus wgot in trouble when he went to the Butchers for 2kgs of meat, he returned with 8Kgs
Tyro Rex @ 28 – no probs – hope to catch you @ the LP drinks!
Brettc @ 30:
“Connex being at least part French-owned, surprisingly has contracted with the similarly French-owned Alstom to build and manage its rail infrastructure.”
Alstom’s maintainance/management role has since been taken over by United Group Infrastructure (an Australian company). Actually I think they may have bought out Alstom’s Australian operations.