CONCLUSIONES   DEL   CAPÍTULO

With Brisbane selected as the case study area, this section continues to provide a bit more background concerning Brisbane’s BRT. Before 2000, rail and bus transit constituted the backbone components of Brisbane’s public transport network, which attracted similar levels of ridership of around 42 million trips on annual basis (Rathwell and Schijns, 2002). In particular, 4 rail transit lines radiating from the city centre served as the major corridors catering for Brisbane’s commuters traveling between the CBD and other locales. Despite a reportedly well usage of the rail transit system, it has been noted that the rail patronage of Brisbane was restrained to the adjacent areas of rail stations, while limitedly coming from a wider catchment (Hoffman, 2008). In the mid-1990s, a bus operator’s visit to Ottawa’s BRT system, Canada inspired the back-then city mayor’s decision to introduce exclusive busway in hopes of capturing the potential catchments that rail transit failed to attract hopefully within a relatively short period of time (Hoffman, 2008).

Based on an inspection of a series of potential corridors, Brisbane’s first busway, the South East Busway (SEB) was constructed and opened in 2000. It is fair to say that Brisbane’s BRT (or particularly, the SEB) was planned from an infrastructure-oriented rather than service-oriented perspective, that there has not been any articulate predication of ridership to guide service allocation (Hoffman, 2008). The actual impact of the SEB on bus ridership, however, appears to be rewarding: a 26% of increase of ridership along the busway corridor six months after its introduction and another 40% of ridership increase the year after (Hoffman, 2008). Such a rate of ridership increase urged the addition of more bus services to the busway, which also reinforced government’s dedication to further expand BRT system. As such, an additional two sections of busways, the Northern Busway (NB) and the Eastern Busway (EB) were subsequently constructed. Along with the SEB, the three busway sections constitute the major infrastructure component of Brisbane’s BRT network (Figure 4.1) (Department of Transport and Main Roads, 2013). The expansion of three busway sections (i.e., the SEB, the NB and the EB) is still on-going at the time of this research. This will result in a further 30 kilometres of busway within the near future.

73 Figure 4.1 Study context

74 Table 4.3 Brisbane's BRT busway and stations, source: Department of Transport and Main Roads (2013a) 11 Queen Street Premium Stop South East 19 Griffith University Premium Stop 20 Upper Mount

Gravatt

Premium Stop 21 Eight Mile Plains Premium Stop Eastern 27 Langlands Park Premium Stop

Total 31.4

A major difference between Brisbane’s BRT and its prototype—Ottawa’s BRT pertains to the integration between land-use and public transport. Compared to Ottawa’s stronger coordination between land-use (e.g., denser development) and BRT planning on a city level, Brisbane’s land-use development showed little response to its BRT possibly due to lack of both political and civilian support (Hoffman, 2008; Rathwell and Schijns, 2002). Given this, instead of attracting population and development to its surroundings to stimulate

75 transit-oriented development, Brisbane’s BRT mainly functions as an enhanced transit service that reaches out to the suburbs around the city. Considering this, there emerges a compelling reason to urge the transformation of Brisbane’s BRT from an initially infrastructure-oriented project to a more service-based system that may better capture the travel needs of Brisbane’s population. The premise of achieving this goal then is to understand its usage pattern over space and time.

Table 4.3 summarises the open year and types of BRT stations for the busway sections. A total of 27 bus stops exclusively serve the busway network, among which 24 are Premium Stops and three are Intermediate Stops. According to the Public Transport Infrastructure Manual by Translink (Brisbane’ transit agency) (Translink, 2012), the Premium Stops are characterised with high passenger demand and highest standard of construction in terms of supporting components (e.g., shelter, seats), whilst the Intermediate Stops are associated with moderate levels of passenger demand and are more limited in terms of shelter and amenities. The stop-spacing of the BRT ranges from 670 metres to 1,650 metres; and real-time information systems are applied to all BRT stations (Currie and Delbosc, 2010).

The fares of Brisbane’s BRT are not charged and managed separately from the rest of the bus network, which adopts a zone-based fare structure (Translink, 2015a). The base fare for an adult passenger is 3.35 Australian dollars when travelling during peak hours and 2.68 dollars during non-peak hours.

An open deign of the busway is adopted that enables on-road buses to freely enter and exit and therefore, capture the travel needs of a wide catchment areas (in particular the south and north suburbs) across Brisbane (Tao et al., 2014). With over 170 bus routes partially or fully operated on the busway network, Brisbane’s BRT involves about two thirds of all bus trips made across the city on both weekday and weekends (Tao et al., 2014). It has been reported that buses running on the busway can reach an average speed of over 50 kilometres per hour (Currie, 2006). During peak hours, the service frequency on the busway can reach a level of 259 buses per hour, coupled with 48 buses per hour off peak (Currie and Delbosc, 2010). A search of bus timetables shows that most of the bus services running on the busway are operated between 5:30am to midnight (Translink, 2015b). These service characteristics consequently yield a patronage of 70 million passenger-trips on an annual basis (Currie, 2006; Currie and Delbosc, 2010). The above figures surpass the performance of most BRT systems in Asia and North America (Hensher and Golob, 2008).

While the infrastructure and service characteristics of Brisbane’s BRT have received some

76 attention, a search of literature indicates that the evidence concerning its financial performance in terms of costs and revenues has been limited. A previous evaluation of Brisbane’s BRT reported a benefit-cost ratio of 0.35 for the SEB, and lower than 1 ratios for the NB and EB (Bitzios et al., 2009). These finding with doubt casted questions on the economic viability of Brisbane’s BRT. It however has been also argued that other aspects such as improvement of road space use, environmental benefits and travel time savings should be included to provide more definitive evidence (Bitzios et al., 2009).