VTAY Fixes Brisbane's Transport

1) Building roads won't work. The ubiquitous single person car trip is the least efficient use of transport infrastructure. If you build more roads and they reduce congestion, it increases the catchment area of the road and people will make trips they used to avoid, because there's less congestion, which will increase congestion. If we're going to fix things we have to accept that driving to work must become the last resort.

2) Public transport must be QUICK CLEAN EFFICIENT and COMFORTABLE. It doesn't have to be that cheap. People will pay for a 30 minute commute instead of a 90 minute death march to and from work if they get to sit down and read the paper like a human being instead of huddled in a fetal position in a pool of junkie vomit.

3) Stop building EVERY FUCKING THING in the CBD. Not everyone lives 5km from the CBD, those that do definitely don't want every else to come there and no one else wants to go there. If you live 20km from the cty, why the hell should you have to drive to the city to cross a bridge to get to a place you can see just across the river. Why are only two bridges outside the CBD?

The Gold Coast is only 80km away from the CBD. It should take half an hour to get there. Tops. it doesn't because Queensland hasn't realised that express doesn't mean stopping at every other station. The point of an express train, dear transport minister, is to EXPRESSLY go to a few places which are then linked by slower trains. What that means is that an express train to the Gold Coast will stop at Mt Gravatt, Logan and Beenleigh (then more stops at the GC like Southport and Robina). The rest of the time it'll be somewhere between these stops, going like a cat with its tail on fire. People who wanted to get to other places near by would take something called a CONNECTING train which would CONNECT them to their final destinations. They would go slower, but they'd run more often because they would be going shorter distances.

How much would all this cost? Well in the case of the French TGV system (300km/hr trains) the most expensive sections of track work out to $15,000,000 per km. A lot of money? Maybe, that means the 100km from the CBD to the GC would cost $1,500,000,000 (1.5 billion). That works out to a tenth of the QLD govt. proposed infrastructure expenditure and would put the two most populous parts of queensland about 20 minutes apart, linked by a rail system cheaper to operate and maintain than an equivalent length of 8 lane highway. Build another 2 lines north to Caloundra and west to Toowomba and all of a sudden it's a viable option to live all the way out there, work in any of the other locations and never see a car. All for around 1/4 of the proposed spend on pointless roads and tunnels and with the added benefit of jobs building/maintaining the trains and other infrastructure.

There are real solutions out there, it's just that politicians don't have imaginations and voters are the kind of people who'll hear 1.5 billion and think you're mad but happily spend 16 billion to shave 15 minutes off their commute for about a week till everyone else figures out the going is good.