The holiday season is almost upon us, and many readers’ holiday plans may well include a visit to my adopted home town of Brisbane. My own plans entail a visit to my original home town of Melbourne, but I digress.
Visitors to Brisbane will notice that a significant new component of the city’s transport infrastructure is the growing network of dedicated busways. Each of the busway stations is equipped with an electronic information board purporting to display information on impending bus arrivals at the station. You are hereby advised that reading and interpreting the information displayed on the information board is, well, somewhat counter-intuitive.
The information on the boards is organised in three columns. In the left-hand column are the route numbers for the buses. In the middle column are the bus destinations. In the right-hand column are the expected arrival times at the busway station of said buses. The bottom line of the information board alternates between a display of the aforesaid information and display of the current time. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line to the art of interpreting the information on the information board.
If the displayed expected arrival times for the buses are earlier than the current time, you can be assured that the information on the screen is completely accurate, and that you are reading an impeccably precise listing of the route numbers and destinations of the buses which have recently passed through the busway station, and the times at which they did so. This information is of little practical value for commuters wanting to know when their desired bus is going to arrive, but it is invariably entirely accurate.
If, however, the displayed expected arrival times for the buses are later than the current time, then during the period in which those buses are expected to arrive, a comparable number of buses will indeed arrive, but they will have completely different route numbers and destinations to those which are displayed on the screen.
So the rule about reading and interpreting Brisbane Busway information boards is:
* retrospective information about bus arrivals is invariably accurate, but useless;
* prospective information about bus arrivals, which would be very useful if accurate, is invariably inaccurate.
There is one particular trap which Busway commuters need to be wary of. If the information board states that the bus you wish to catch will not be arriving for several minutes (say 5 minutes or more) don’t succumb to the temptation to lean back on the bench to read, phone or text something or do something with your laptop. If you do, your bus will invariably arrive several minutes earlier than advertised while your attention is focused on your book, phone or laptop, and when you look up you’ll see the back of your bus disappearing into the distance. Conversely, if the screen tells you that your bus will be arriving within the next 2-3 minutes, don’t get too excited because anxious, frustrated 20 minute waits standing at the station are not fun. The correct attitude to take is best described as “alert, but not agog”. This should be accompanied by a philosophical outlook of gratitude that you are travelling on a Brisbane Busway and are thereby spared the tribulations of Sydney train commuters packed into latter-day Stolypin cars sitting stationary between stations in 40+ degree heat, and Melbourne tram commuters who have had the misfortune to attract the attention of the officious ticket inspectors.
I live in Canberra, close to Woden so am spoilt when it comes to regularity of bus services. But I plan to move to Gold Coast on retirement and have a house in Southport. When I visit I used to catch a flight to Brisbane and pick up a cheap, $29 a day, hire car.
However, more recently I have been learning to travel on public transport in SE Queensland. To do this you must put yourself into the mindset of the local workers rather than being a tourist and being fleeced by tourist rates for everything.
I start with the website on how to plan your trip at: http://www.translink.com.au/ Using this I am able to plan my moves before I arrive and avoid the overpriced tourist busses that deliver to hotel doors.
I set my trip requests to all means of transport, rail, bus, and ferry. On our last trip my husband and I spent a day travelling from Zone 13 Broadbeach by train into Brisbane at South Bank, a couple of bus trips in Brisbane, and then by ferry along the Brisbane River before returning home, all on two single daily tickets.
One thing I notice on Queensland transport is they are much noisier than in Canberra. People talk to each other, even to strangers. So what if the busses are a little out of synch. Just wind down and have a chat about it to a new best friend.
I was surprised when I was in Melbourne that the public transport info wasn’t available on my iPhone GoogleMaps application. In Adelaide I can put in any location I am, and where I want to go, and it will tell me the bus/train/tram to catch, what time it is scheduled, how long the journey will take and what side of the road to stand on to catch it.
It’s not always the route I would choose knowing the options available, but it means I consider public transport more often than I used to when going to parts of town I’m not familiar all that familiar with. The TranAdelaide schedules are pretty much unreadable to me. I used to need one to get to and from my place to the city…now I need 4 different ones.
Nana Levu, I’ve also used the Translink journey planner on occasions, but I find that sometimes the journey plan it comes up with isn’t as good as what I can come up with by studying the timetables and connections on the same web site and working out my own plan from that
Indeed; most transport planners leave huge gaps between connections so often planning manually gives better outcomes.
I could often get better travel times with 5 min connections on the unfailingly punctual Japan rail system by planning manually trips than the 20min+ connections that the primary transport planner, Hyperdia, gives. Often I save up to 1 to 2 hours on extended journeys with multiple connections, by doing it manually.
Yeah, built in to the Translink system is an assumption that people walking between changeover stops will do so quite slowly – I think there’s also a “just in case” buffer of a couple of extra minutes added automatically too, presumably to make up for heavy traffic (doesn’t always work!) I can sometimes plan faster trips myself as well, but they do require a brisk stride and some willingness to take a risk
I generally like these electronic trip planners, especially since they collate timetable data into a more accessible form whilst the individual transport forms, especially buses, seem to love horrible PDFs.
That said, the NSW STA trip planner did expect certain qualities of me that were rather too messianic for my taste.
on the few occasions I have had the misfortune to be in Southern Cross station, I have always had an overnight bag or bigger, I have observed that there are no pedestrian travellators and its 1 km walk from suburban trains or country trains to the Skybus to the Airports. How can older and poorer passengers get themselves and their baggage to the airport? remember Tullamarine had travellators long before Southern Cross station was built.
Our shady bus stop at Ashfield, Sydney, has been over to the taxis and we have been forced to use a tin-roofed shed with only one bench, in the full glare of the sun.
I suspect this guy had a hand in this: http://www.smh.com.au/national/inside-the-world-of-mr-taxi-20090918-fv9k.html
During the 1980s and 1990s the architecture and seating at Sydney’s Central Station enabled people waiting long hours for a late night or early morning train service to lie down on the benches and get some sleep in reasonably sheltered surroundings whilst waiting for their train. One of the “improvements” that seemed to occur around the time of the Olympics was that the old benches were replaced with wooden benches which were partitioned into sitting-only sized spaces by metal armrests, and the wall on the southern side separating the station plaza from the long-distance platforms was removed, exposing the entire area to cold southerlies.
Richard green #6 Messianic! You mean that was not a ferry route?
“So the rule about reading and interpreting Brisbane Busway information boards is:
* retrospective information about bus arrivals is invariably accurate, but useless;
* prospective information about bus arrivals, which would be very useful if accurate, is invariably inaccurate.”
So who was the contract outsourced to, Major Major Disinformation Services?
Can we get a class action suit happening?
In Sweden in the late 1990’s, particularly at Malmo station, even if you were sitting completely upright, if you even looked like falling asleep, a police officer would tap you on the shoulder and ask you to move along….blinking too slowly would arouse suspicion. I had a rail pass, so I was inevitably waiting for the train to arrive so I could sleep on it whilst journeying to who-knows-where. The problem was, if you had a pass they didn’t give you a seat number, so you had to hope that no swedish person had a ticket for the specific seat you sat in, because even if the rest of the train was completely empty, the Swedish person will wake you from your slumber and inform you politely that you are sitting in their seat. grah.
Interesting. I haven’t had this problem on the Brisbane busway, though I’ve had it in plenty of second-tier transit systems in America. Readers my enjoy my public transport blog http://www.humantransit.org, where I discuss Brisbane frequently.
Paul, you’re taking me back to my adolescence.
I remember the old Central Station well with the big round orange seats—like rejects from the set of Logan’s Run. Fact is, the things most people miss from the station of the 1990s are the garbage bins. Nobody’s been blown up at Central since September 2001, but the litter’s out of control.
The rough sleepers IIRC didn’t stay in the terminal, they used to camp at night in the foregarden under the trees (they’re still there) and in Railway Square bus interchange where the round roof was lower and there was less wind. The Council replaced it because it was so dangerous; it kept catching fire when the homeless men tried to keep themselves warm. There were these wooden escalators down into the Devonshire Street tunnel that sounded like a descent into Hell complete with a blast of warm air smelling of stale urine and pigeon feathers.
Maybe the new steel one’s impersonal and cold but at least it doesn’t remind you of your own mortality every time you go through it.
This information in this blog is (unlike the the electronic information boards) entirely accurate. Of course my favourite thing to do is watch the board as the predicted time for your bus comes and goes, then see the ‘prediction’ disappear entirely for 5 or 10 minutes, to be replaced by a new, possibly more accurate prediction. It’s hours of enjoyment for the whole family (or, if you’ve got a couple of tired & cranky kids who just want to get home, perhaps not…)
furious @ 2, the best thing Adelaide Metro has done for years is outsource their trip planning to Google. I’ve noticed that their timetables and in-house maps get more incomprehensible (and the service gets worse) with each iteration. (As an aside, we were promised that public transport would be more efficient once it was privatised … )
The thing is, I’m reasonably bright (I have a mathematics degree), and I was a cartographer for about 20 years, and I find the Adelaide Metro stuff unusable. Thank christ there are some really clever people working for Google, or I couldn’t get around by bus.
furious, next time you’re in Melbourne, download the Metlink iPhone app which has a journey planner built in. Also get the TramTracker app, which gives you real-time arrival information for every tram stop in Melbourne. Hours of fun!
I don’t know what you Adelaide people are complaining about, I find this map a model of clarity!
http://www.adelaidemetro.com.au//routes/pdfs/cbdmap_0909.pdf
Angus, the person responsible for that monstrosity should hand in his (or her – less likely – the women at the Regiment were generally a bit more meticulous than the blokes) cartographic licence (*) immediately.
(*) In-joke – “cartographic licence” is the judgement exercised by the cartographer on what to leave in, what to omit, and how to portray it so that the end result resembles the territory sufficiently well to be useful.
Public transport in Sydney is so bad that enlisting some of the wild camels inhabiting central Australia as passenger taxis would be an improvement. The trip lanner is as good as any of it gets bit it bears no relationship to the shambles of actual delivery. My routine train today dematerialised. Again. Train timetables are now a work of utopian fiction or a statement of aspiration rather than a realistic guess as to arrival and departure.
It is easy to imagine how Mussolini was popular. Or Kennett for that matter.
Ah, thanks Angus, I’ll do that. I lurv Melbourne trams.
David Irving, I live at Maslin Beach and my sister lives at Port Noarlunga, we stared at 3 different timetables for about 20 minutes and still couldn’t work out what bus she was meant to be catching and where, we were trying to be more enviro-savvy, but I ended up just driving her. My mum lives up the road, and she uses the fact that she is a whiz at interpreting the bus timetables as evidence that she’s still got all her marbles….I’m dubious.
Anyhow, the next time, having consulted with my mum, ‘the public transport oracle’, my sister managed to catch the bus on time…the price = $4.50. The journey was within the zone, which if you lived in the inner city would be a lot cheaper than $4.50, but in an example of how fringe-dwellers get screwed, yet again, you have to buy the highest price ticket, no matter how short the trip is if you live in zone 3…at least that was what the bus driver said. It seems really unfair. Likewise, last summer a two hour ticket rarely got me home, [so I had to buy two tickets to make one trip!], because of the speed of the trains on the buckled tracks. In fact last february, using mass transit, I got from Richmond, Melbourne to Tullamarine airport and on to Adelaide city, faster than I could get from Adelaide city to home, which, for our interstate friends, is about a 40 minute drive.
oh sorry this is turning into a real whinge from me, but what bothers me most is when I first moved here, I didn’t even have a drivers license and I looked at the public transport situation before buying and thought it was pretty good [and simple!!!], and it has been in steady decline ever since, despite the fact that the area just south of me is experiencing strong population growth. The govt has committed to extending and electrifying the rail, which will hopefully make the service more reliable.
As a frequent user of Melbourne’s Trams, I have to say the ‘real time’ tram boards have similar issues of “erm… it says arrival ‘now’… and yet… no”.
Thankfully, the wait is never too long, unless some drama has affected the line – like a car accident in front of the tram, or power lines down. Also thankfully, I live close enough to the city that if pressed, I could walk home!
furious, the public transport here used to be almost acceptable (if you lived within 15 km of the CBD and as long as you didn’t compare it with Melbourne), but it’s just been getting worse and worse, especially since the Libs sold it off to the private sector.
I don’t mind my daily commute on Brissie buses, which takes in both the south and north busways. We didn’t replace our car when it was written off about 3 years ago (rear-ended while stationary at traffic lights), and have managed quite well without it. Journey planner is great, and I regard the quick changeovers that we sometimes manage as a bonus.
Sydney on the other hand…
A while ago my daughter was in Sydney, staying in Marrickville and attending Macquarie. The trip planner always suggested routes through Strathfield, even though it is quicker via the city. We stopped using it.
I love waiting for a bus, the posted time for the bus passes, the bus fails to arrive and the “scheduled” bus just roll off the top of the list, never to be seen again…like the bus when you think about it.
These screens are something like a car accident, you don’t really want to look at it but you can’t help yourself.
We only used the Brisbane CITY CAT during our stay and that service was great, quick and cheap. so maybe they should make more use of the river transport that the road transport.