Premier Anna Bligh has announced free travel on all TransLink services tomorrow Wednesday 29 February) following this morning's train service disruptions.
Free Public Transport with Translink (QLD) Today!!! -Wednesday 29 February
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Cheers :)
Working now thanks. I'm off to beach tomorrow - FREE!
Might pop into Ikea on the way for 29% off, free drink, & use free gift card at Annaconda next door. A good day out for an OzBargainer!
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I keep seeing this '.' Post, but have no idea what is meant by it. Googled, but just gives the usual puntuation meaning. What does it mean?
I use for when I want to delete my post. Wish they had a delete post button :/
Just deleted my post, and left the '.' before I read your post! Thanks.
But why did the '.' Post above get 2 '+' votes, unless it was a brilliant but deleted post?? CONFUSED.
Buying votes again?
Bit late for that - the train has well and truly left the station on that one I'd say.
It seems they only give free public transport at election time.
Every other time my train doesn't arrive it appears that its "not on the table."
So it's free on Wednesday but the train wont arrive till Thursday?
No, that's today's train. Wednesday's will be roughly on time.
trains lost power in melb yesterday for hours due to the storm we had…enjoy your free transport brisbanites, even if you think it's shite, because us melbournians only get stuff like that at midnight on NYE if we're lucky
NSW'ers dont get anything too. We have delays all the time. Esp when it is wet or stormy.
QLD don't get anything either unless there's an election coming up.
Sure we do, increases in cost of living.
LOL Read the t&c… only happens on 29 Feb, after major stuff ups the day before, & during an election campaign everyone was distracted from,… All conditions must be met for free transport.
But you don't have an election coming up next month. :]
Conservative Ted has barely done anything since being elected. Well, apart from sacking several thousand people, putting more money into private schools and trying to take money away from libraries. What makes you think he would give us peasants free travel?
Good on Anna for doing this.
Fantastic, we were just complaining about that today (that we shouldn't have been charged), so i'm going to look forward to my free fares tomorrow!
To bad about the other 364 days. It would cost me $60 for 5 return trips a week. In New York you can pay $23/week for UNLIMITED use of subway and buses. QLD has become a joke, and an expensive one at that.
BYE Bligh.
Bye Bye Bligh indeed!
Its such a joke, i pay $50 a week (5 return trips) and when i first started my city job 4 years ago i was paying $36 a week, such a rip off.It does not mean if you got Newman and you would pay less.
And if you guys compare it with other cities as they got more people so
it is obviously the price is going to be cheaper.Such a shallow thinking.
I'm not saying that. But putting it up 10% each year is kinda not cool!
Lower population isn't really an excuse. Transperth will do you a week's worth for $28.50 and it's trains aren't falling apart like QLD's ones are.
What about Adelaide? Perth? Auckland? In fact, look at all of these cities with cheaper public transport than Brisbane: http://brizcommuter.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/2012-world-fare-…
Auckland? Really?! Lol… public transport and Auckland used in the same sentence :)
Ok, that might be a bit harsh, but if I had a choice between AKL public transport and BNE public transport, I'd go BNE without hesitation.
And now any other trips are free for the week.
the other 365 days, it's a leap year
In Sydney you can pay $25.5 for unlimited use of bus, trains and ferry for the week :)
Isn't that the concession price??
I believe adult is $51/ week or $194 for 28 days
( which is what I fork out every "month")
I'm not sure what is intended from this.
Taking public transport in QLD is more expensive then a car.
Its really only useful for going to the city in peak hour.
Still cheaper to drive into the city and pay $8 parking on the street.
Its also cheaper to go to the city and pay for underground parking if two people need to go to the city.
Its not worth it if you go alone but then as you said there is street parking.
Either way, in your car you get full control over where you go and you don't have to deal with crazy people on the train.
Or in my case, spend 15 minutes walking to the bus stop from the office and then wait 15 minutes for the bus to arrive. Then have the trip take twice as long because it stops all the time.
same here. I drive in with my girlfriend and rent a carpark. break even, even with fuel!
has it gone up that much, I remember a day tripper running me 6.50 or something from about half an hour outside of town
Not for me. 30 bucks petrol a day if I drive. 5 bucks petrol + 10 bucks train if I train it. If I worked more than 500m from a train station I probably wouldn't be interested though (absolutely no inclination to bus).
$30 a day petrol? What do you drive??
No offense, but you are the one who purchased a car that uses 10x more fuel then regular cars, that's your stupid choice.
For example I drive 60mins a day on weekdays and some on weekends and spend $20-25 a week on petrol.
Based on your $5 each way train tickets I'm doubting you are much further then my work.
And then you haven't even factored in time wasted waiting for it, late/canceled trains, rain etc.
And then you haven't even factored in time wasted waiting for it, late/canceled trains, rain etc.
but you can do stuff on a train, which you can't do while you are driving a car. you have not factored this in
Like getting stabbed? Sounds fun.
Like getting stabbed? Sounds fun
don't worry, i ordered the ozbargain tampon samples a short while back which i can use to jab into the wound to soak up the blood.
I seriously hope the stuff you do on the train is not what you would be normally doing at home.
At best you can play on your phone or perhaps even play on your laptop while being cramped in and everyone looking at you and what your doing on your laptop.
Its really just a small perk that makes being on the train a little better then horrible.
I play a bit of DS or PSP. On a 40 minute train trip, both ways, 5 days a week, that's an extra six and a half hours of video game time per week (and usually the only video game time I get at all these days).
I use the train time to check the news, my emails (work and personal), and if I have time, OzB and FB. Sure I could do these at home, but then I'd still be at home. :) This is a pretty big plus for me. That, and driving in and out of the CBD at rush hour is no fun, not to mention parking costs etc.
That said, I think the public transport is Brisbane is overpriced, nearly $9 a day for me and another nearly $9 per day for my wife (she goes to a different station, so we couldn't drive together).
The trains are always pretty crowded though, so perhaps not…
As above, some people read or check the same websites they otherwise would be at home anyway. Depending on where you are and where you are going, the wasted time isn't always massive if you are likely to get hit by traffic in the car. In fact in those scenarios, you may argue you are more productive on a train or whetever.
It's highly dependant on the individual, their mode of transport, how often that transport operates and where they are going to and at what time.
edit: Also theres the actual cost of the vehicle. Previously I lived 5 - 15 minutes on a bus from town (in New Farm, QLD). The stop 50m from my door ran every 15 minutes week days until about midnight, where it dropped back to something like 30 mins to an hour or whatever. Given where I worked and needed to go 98% of the time (either to town or 1km the other way to work) it really didn't make a heap of sense to own a car. $3.20 or whatever it was to get to town, while possibly expensive for the trip length, would be far less than any parking I'd pay in town and thats before factoring in the cars purchase itself.
Now I live in Canberra I wouldn't dream of not owning a vehicle. Where you live makes a massive difference.
And there's no road rage? A car is safer than a train in a crash?
Late response, but what the hell. I drive a '99 Prado. Was given to me and its all I can afford as a student. Buying a car to save petrol is about as retarded as they come.
I live in Coolangatta and drive to south Brisbane every day, it's around 120 km of mostly highway at 110km/h. Car does around 13L/100km so its very easily $30/day. Generally if I'm very lucky with traffic its an hour and 15 minute drive. However, given I can't trust traffic I generally have to leave early to ensure I'm not late.
Train on the other hand is a single express from Varsity Lakes and costs ~$5.10, takes a little over an hour and always arrives at the same time, every time. Takes me around 20 minutes to drive to the station and can get free parking easily.
Even assuming your super car (and assuming you average 60km/h for your daily commute, thus 300 km @ $20 (~15L at current pricing) so 5L/100km) that's still a good $15 in petrol.
Car = 1.5 hours @ $30. OR if I were to spend $10,000 on a new car to save money (lol) still $15.
Train = 1.5 hours @ $10.Which would you take? Granted I have a concession card so YMMV, but given you've all attacked me on my own usage scenario I think its fair.
Taking public transport in QLD is more expensive then a car.
you really think so? i know public transport is getting more expensive but once you take into account fuel, wear & tear, maintenence costs, depreciation, parking etc i think public transport would still work out cheaper.
Slightly maybe, but then you factor in how much you value your time.
I particularly liked the immediate 15% increase in fares after the flood. This temporary measure to rebuild some of the infrastructure seems to have become built into the ticket price now.
The problem is current travellers are expected to fund future developments in new areas that current travellers will probably never use.
If this government could manage the budget, current travellers should simply be funding maintenance of current routes and wages and future development should be funded by taxes. But alas, we have a Labor government who no matter how much money they are given, they always need more from the people.
The thing is, the 15% increase in fares was planned and announced more than a year before the floods. Then, as soon as the flood hits, they put out a press release saying that the fare increase is for flood recovery.
Disgusting.
That year and at least the next three years (from memory) are planned well in advance.
Have a look at the website and figure ho much you'll be forking out per week in a year or two with continual 15% increases.
Ten years ago, I couldn't praise the train system more highly (with a few hiccups of course). The system these days is a muddled fuss!
I've actually done the maths for it and yes I can guarantee you that using public transport is more expensive then a car except for expensive parking situations.
This doesn't even factor in lost time you could be working more or doing something else.
Once you factor in time lost per year, its likely enough to warrant the initial cost of a decent car.
I'd be interested to see the calculations (honestly). I'd be in the expensive parking situation (CBD) but even with cheap parking I'm sure it's more expensive.
Will probably have a lot to do with how far away you live too…
"except for expensive parking situations."
Which is anyone in the CBD
It depends on a lot of factors… What you drive, maintenance, whether you have parking at work. It would be cheaper if I took public transport but for me I'd rather sit in my car in air con in my 3L twincroll turbo. My car is probably the only thing Im not stingy over… for everything else there's ozbargain.
It costs me about $10 for a return ticket on a bus at the Gold Coast. That's about 12km of travel tops. Would a car cost more to go that distance?
No, but you may have to pay for parking in some places which in certain cities can be very expensive.
Just a 4 zone adult go-card fare is $2500 a year for ten trips each week ($4.77 x 10 trips x 52 weeks).
Fuel for an efficient 1.6L engine (@ 450km/30L tank) assuming 15km a trip and $1.50 per L, works out at $520 a year in fuel. If you have a car anyway then the depreciation and rego is negligable. Rego and depreciation on my $6000 2nd-hand car is wayyy less than $2500 a year.
How do you get $520 a year from those figures?
Working backwards, $520/year in fuel at $1.5/L = 347L of fuel. Ten trips over 52 weeks = 520 trips or ~0.66L per trip. I presume the 15km is each way (which is too close for 4 zones… I'm 16km each way and that's only 3 zones, but anyway) which means you're averaging less than 4.5L/100km in urban traffic? That is indeed an efficient car!
This is also ignoring other car costs such as tyres, oil, etc. and assuming parking is free.
Just five years ago, that would have cost you $1088.00 a year if you only went by train (QR Citytrain 12 month ticket), or $1305.6 a year if you used any other modes of public transport ($108.80 monthly ticket x 12). That's an increase of either 90% or 128% in five years, depending on which mode of transport you used. In the same period of time, the CPI has increased by less than 16%.
How about if there are at least two people travelling together everyday? Will that make a car definitely cheaper than public transport?
You did factor in the rego, petrol, maintenance, cleaning, depreciation, interest payments, parking, and the time costs of maintaining a car, etc in you cost??? Don't know where you get your figures from.
And after 10 public transport trips, all other trips are free for the week.RACQ calculates the average running cost of a medium vehicle as $216.69/wk. http://www.racq.com.au/motoring/cars/car_economy/vehicle_run…
(Just got rid of my car & 4WD & loving the lower stress life with more money.)Driving just across the Gateway Bridge to the airport is about the same cost as the bus fare for 2 from Garden city to the airport, and no expensive parking charges.
Is there a bus service from Garden City to the airport?
590
Yes, 590. All zone 3, so smallest fare. Goes as far as DFO, then take FREE shuttle every 20 minutes to domestic & international terminals from same same stop.
Been running for 6 months - a fast service, every 10 or 15 minutes in peak hours, 7 days a week. Considering Gateway toll is over $4 each way, a bargain.
Better this than revolution…
I'm a student, it costs me maybe $8 a week tops to get to uni and back every day. Much better than driving. I only use my car if I have to go get groceries and crap.
Surely student accommodation isn't that bad that you don't have a toilet where you live? :)
wut
I don't bother with student accommodation.
Ok at home then. :)
Oh man, I totally didn't get what you meant.
Nice one (not sarcastic).
why dont you all drive then, my trip might be more enjoyable if u whingers did
So Bligh says this is going to cost them $1,000,000 in fares.
- $1m x 365 days = $365m
- 25% of Translink revenue is fares and the 75% is from the state budget, so multiply x 4 = $1.46 billion
- then divide by average wage ~$66k = 22,121 full time workers to run the system.
Can that be right? I think there's a lot fewer transport workers than that.
Plus I don't think bus drivers are on average wage. Somehow someone is probably taking a big cut here. No wonder we all think fares are expensive.
Research it yourself and lets see what we can work out.
What about infrastructure costs and the like…cost of vehicles, maintanence and fuel
edit: Also if it is "1 million" in fares, that doesn't mean every day would be the same. I imagine theres a good chance weekends are a fraction of the weekday income…as low as 15% or 20% or whatever of a week day really wouldn't surprise me.
Sounds like a big vote buy. Trying to bribe voters and making up for the incompetent
QLD rail system. Classic Anna Bligh >.<If you think the other fool can do any better, I'd say you have another thing coming. In Victoria, they elected a Liberal premier and the service is worse!
They're all as bad as each-other… as Monty Brewster says, "Vote none of the above".
What we may need is less governance and more culpability.
I beg to differ. Ever travelled on the Brisbane busway that isn't run by the state?
The difference is stark. Come up here and try the run from St. Lucia to City - its incredible.
If they applied the same ingenuity to the train system it wouldn't be the run down mess it is.St Lucia to the city is walking distance and a university is also located as a central point.
What's the miracle?
Brisbane, quite some time ago, had a nice tram system much like Melbourne (which I envy every time I visit); this was scrapped for less ingenious methods of travel that are prone to failure, add to the congestion and now have high prices exceeding most systems in the world, spare a few.
edit: quick link to show just how effective the trams were in the 60's.
http://railbotforum.org/mbs/index.php?topic=3630.0
Hardly. We're a cynical mob with short memories, not easily bought. Come election day, no one will remember the freebee, but many will remember why it was given.
Free public transport, only for casual users….
If you already have a season ticket of some sort eg weekly monthly yearly you've already paid for the day.
Weekly, monthly, and yearly tickets have been abolished anyway.
… Yes, it's stupid.
So good to see a knowledgeable viewpoint, where facts do not cloud your thinking!
Obviously never caught public transport for years otherwise you would know about fares, but still have a firm opinion. Anyone who uses public transport in SEQld will not pay. Simple! I'm off to the beach.
Every Feb 29 should be a free transport day…after all, it happens only once every four years.
I grew up on economic theories of transport. In my favourite, Ivan Illich wrote about economics in terms of human hours, rather than money. He contrasted the speeds of Westerners in cars with less developed groups. He concluded car drivers speed of travel was slower than that of more primative transport like bicycles. The enormous amount of time invested in work to buy the car, more to operate it, often resulted in a negative speed of travel. The more you spend on vehicles, generally the more hours you work to buy & store them in parking or extra real-estate costs, so the slower your average speed (distance / time invested in travel related costs).
I like using public transport. Its a great bargain. The time (working less for something that is used so little & depreciates so quickly) & money saved is spent on travel, of course on public transport, in other countries.
"The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car…. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.
The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent." http://www.altruists.org/static/files/Social%20effects%20of%…
Awesome post… still won't stop me from driving
It's an excellent indication to the true cost of a car.
It was to get the grey matter working a little differently. I used to help very successful people & businesses think differently. For 1 business that meant a projected increase in sales of $300M pa for 5 minutes thinking differently.
Unfortunately it is 'human nature' to do the same-old same-old & justify why we will not change (a lot of that here).
Sharmans, Zen Masters & others shook the mind from its complacency. Try it. Its amazing what thinking & acting differently can do. Now I just travel the world.
Did it ever occur to you that some people actually enjoy and take pleasure in owning and driving a car?
Wow!! But that has nothing to do with the economics of transportation, just desire.
Regardless your post is wrong.
For most people cars use less time and save them money.
PERHAPS if you work in the city and NEVER go anywhere in your free time your post might be true.
I really don't believe that 100% of the places someone likes to go are next to a train station.
This is from someone who has taken public transport in the past and know people who do, half of using public transport is walking from the train station to your destination….
Wow, so public transport is like going to the gym, only free.
It only gets better!!!Regardless your post is wrong.
Why? So, no evidence, just more justification why you like to drive. And that justification was presented as an economic argument by you above, of why driving is cheaper than public transport!!!
You should have made your biased economics clear to everyone before.
My post was limited to the economics of private vehicles for transportation, not what you like to do to enjoy yourself. You disproved nothing just showed a common bias to present a positive case for what you like, how reasoned you position is as you have done the calculations, and denegrate other options. That used to be the basis for slavery, discrimination, armed take over of others countries - as 'we' know best & it made perfect sense to those who benefited.
Pity you fail to be aware of this in your argument.
Neg, but not refuted - "very interesting".
A neg requires no intellectual strain.
Its beauty is its brevity.
But cowards may hide behind its anonymity.
"The enormous amount of time invested in work to buy the car, more to operate it, often resulted in a negative speed of travel."
My work hours are fixed, as are most peoples here I imagine, so either way I'm paid to do 40 hour weeks. To me, and I imagine many others, they aren't saving any time at all by riding a bike, just their finances will be redistributed differently. The entire theory, while nice to bring up over dinner I'm sure, is incredibly flawed and seems to be a theory based on catching attention rather than having any real world merit.
If you assume you have to spend 40hours at your desk irrespective of your mode of transport, then not only are you not losing any time by buying a vehicle, for most people the time spent is substantially less given either way you are leaving work at 5pm in the evening.
I think the point was - to afford and run the car you need to work the extra hours.
If you didn't have a car, the associated running costs and time/care maintaining it, you would save money == time.
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The link you provided doesn't work. Try this one:
http://translink.com.au/about-translink/reporting-and-public…