Pain, Trains & Automobiles
By: Trent Dalton
It can take Trent Dalton more than an hour to drive - or is that crawl? - 17 kilometres to work each day.
Will he save any time by using Brisbane's exhausted public transport system? Or should he just get on his bike?
Welcome to the suck. Brisbane, 8am, and 596,000 cars, 780 buses and 160 trains are on the move: overworked cells squeezing through thickened arteries to a clogged city heart.
That's me on the Ipswich Motorway, in the white Toyota Corolla pressed between the rust-coloured Holden and the poultry truck that's been riding my rear bumper for a kilometre. I'm the guy tapping his fingers on the steering wheel wondering how, in my time of dying, I will view the two hours a day that I spend driving to and from the city. Two hours multiplied by 264 yearly workdays multiplied by a further 30 years of working life equals 15,840 hours equals 660 days equals 1.8 years. That's enough time to build a deck on my house on which I could drink maybe 500 beers watching two Brisbane Broncos seasons. I could write a book in that time: about an arrogant poultry truck driver who changes his ways after surviving a brutal road rage incident.
We are stationary. We're the nowhere people: drivers in their thousands, bumper-to-bumper as far as our weary, hate-filled eyes can see. I feel like glow slime in a child's novelty toy, wearily sliding toward my destination, only to be tipped upside down eight hours later and forced to begin again. This is my life and it's ending one day at a time. Beep. Beep. Chook Man wants me to crawl faster. He's gesturing something behind the wheel. It looks like he's playing charades. I have one for him: one word, two syllables, sounds like banker.
Egg Head cuts into the right lane and overtakes me, then cuts back sharply into the left lane in front of me, nearly clipping my front bumper. Once upon a time, such behaviour would have boiled my blood. But since May, when my spirit was finally broken by the Ipswich Motorway, I've developed a zombie-like numbness toward impatient motorists. Now I simply smile, shake my head and add another nail to the coffin of humanity.
BRISBANE CITY COUNCIL PREDICTS THAT IN TEN years - in 2016 - there will be 450,000 more people in Brisbane. If existing traffic trends continue, this will mean a 40 per cent increase in vehicle travel and this - keep both hands on the wheel now - means a 400 per cent increase in congestion delay. That's four times worse than it is now. This will lead to an estimated total congestion cost to Brisbane of $9.3 billion, greater than estimates for Sydney and Melbourne. Council calls this "Brisbane's transport dilemma". I call it Brisbane's transport catastrophe.
I know every inch of this journey: the sun that burns your right cheek near the Granard Road turnoff; the hard sell of the Moorooka Magic Mile; the two workers in white overalls who have their morning smoke outside the Sanitarium factory; the guy who puts the chairs out at the Morrison Hotel. Same trip, different day. Except today, I'm timing the run. How long does it take to drive from my home in Darra in Brisbane's outer west to the GPO in the centre of the city?
I try a rat run via Annerley Road. I weave past a gang of road workers. I zip around a car parked in a clearway, dodge a black Jeep Cherokee that merges without indicating. Focus. A car horn sounds in my right ear. Is that directed at me? To my right, a man in a silver BMW holds a mobile phone to his ear with his right hand. He's honking his horn with his left.
Beep, he exclaims to anyone who'll listen. Honk, he demands. The bloke can't keep his hand off his horn. And then we've stopped dead, outside the Mater Mothers', where Annerley Road turns into Stanley Street. I call this The Bog, a 100-metre stretch of road that takes, consistently, 15 minutes to cross. It's a vortex for rat runners of the south and west. Drawn by a brief patch of free-flowing road, we meet here like thirsty dogs at a trickling water trough. We wait for a green light that never comes. Irritation turns to desperation turns to aggravation. There's a bumper sticker on the car in front of me: "Miracles happen". Indeed they do: great seas part, robed men walk on water and the people of Brisbane get to work on time. Then, on a pre-election sign set above the Bad Girls strip joint, I see his face: the big forehead, the gap-toothed grin, the narrow eyes. Did you do this to us, Mr Beattie? Or was it your predecessors: the visionless men who designed Brisbane as merely a secondary penal settlement after Sydney, a place that did not require the broad transport avenues and corridors that Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth were blessed with. Or was it the succession of state leaders who have not invested in city infrastructure for fear of losing the regional vote?
I'm close to the Riverside Expressway, the end is near. But first I must cross The Gauntlet, an Expressway access point that sees four lanes merging into one. Indicating is pointless here. This is no place for the timid, the courteous or the light-footed. One must find a gap and floor it, screaming "kamikaze" as you go.
I circle the city searching for a cheap car park. Any car park. A series of flashing red "full" signs forces me to park in the MacArthur Central car park, which has free spaces because Bill Gates, the Sultan of Brunei and others who can afford it are out of town. To park my car here for the day (longer than six hours) will cost $35. That's $1050 a month.
At the fruit stand opposite the GPO on Queen Street, I check my watch. It's 9.15am. The journey has taken me 75 minutes. I buy a pear for $1.20, about the price of a litre of petrol.
THE PROPERTY COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA'S FIVE-hour traffic saturation and solutions seminar, entitled Tunnels, Tolls, Bridges and Busways, began five minutes ago. I'm late: traffic was hell. In a soft-lit conference room in Brisbane's Sofitel Hotel, about 30 men in suits - politicians, developers, engineers, demographers - discuss Brisbane's transport dilemma.
Councillor Graham Quirk, chairman of Brisbane City Council's Roads and Traffic Committee, is explaining TransApex, Mayor Campbell Newman's solution. It's a proposed network of four tunnels and a bridge. The tunnels include: the North-South Bypass Tunnel, linking Woolloongabba to Bowen Hills (under construction); the Airport Link, connecting the CBD to the airport; the Northern Link, linking the Western Freeway to the Inner City Bypass; and the East-West Link, linking the Western Freeway to the Pacific Motorway. The bridge in question is the Hale Street Link, stretching from the end of Hale Street in Milton to South Brisbane.
On the surface, TransApex seems a positive alternative for a city which, for decades, has been sorely lacking in alternatives. Many of Brisbane's major roads were designed to bring traffic through the city, rather than around it. According to Campbell Newman, 43 per cent of city-based traffic is throughTraffic: commuters not needing to go through the city but ending up there because that's where the roads take them. The network is squeezed. It's like the mechanics of a clock: each spring, each wheel depends on the other. Break one piece in the system and the system breaks down.
TransApex represents a much-needed ring road system to take traffic around the city. But the plan is riddled with question marks. TransApex is being funded through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), in which private companies profit from building public necessities such as the North-South Bypass Tunnel. Tolls are applied at rates that not only cover the cost of construction but also bring profits.
Will the CBD be further congested by motorists unwilling to pay the $3.70 North-South Bypass toll?
Will council increase profits by directing more traffic into the tunnels? What will the air be like in a 6.8km tunnel in which people could spend ten minutes during peak-hour periods? Will the Hale Street Link spell the demise of the vibrant communities of South Brisbane and West End? The questions fly around the Sofitel conference room until Ken Willett, RACQ's Executive Manager Economic and Public Policy, stands up and gives some answers.
I spoke to Willett a week ago, on the phone. "This is Brisbane's next crisis," he said. "We've had health, we've had water. Traffic is next."
I expected Willett to be bigger: a bigger frame to support his big ideas. He's not much taller than the conference room podium, but he gets the message across. "Our governments' anti-congestion policies will work only when you see this," he says, conjuring a new image on his PowerPoint presentation: a flying pig. "We've got a real problem with the political system imbalance in Australia. The Commonwealth Government collects about one-and-a-half times the revenue it needs to perform its functions. The state and local governments are at 55 per cent of what they need. They're starved of funds."
Willett is a motoring lobbyist. His controversial arguments naturally lean toward more money for better roads. He has as many supporters as he does knockers. But today there are few heads shaking at his central theme: that the Commonwealth must start accepting responsibility for Brisbane's traffic crisis.
The federal government does not have constitutional responsibility for roads. Section 96 of the Constitution states: "Parliament may grant financial assistance to any State on such terms and conditions as the Parliament sees fit." Since 1922, when the Commonwealth began providing financial grants for road works, it has seen fit to, more often than not, give Brisbane the cold shoulder. Brisbane City Council has been forced to divert large chunks of capital works money to whatever infrastructure problem presented itself at the time. It was too busy sealing dusty roads, providing healthy drinking water and sewering the city to worry about providing a functioning transport system for the future.
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth's stance has been to encourage state and local governments to attract private dollars and install tolling systems to pay for infrastructure, despite the fact it receives $2.7 billion in fuel taxes from Queensland motorists each year. According to Willett, it was the Commonwealth that insisted upgrades of the Gateway Motorway be paid for by tolls. It was the Commonwealth that provided no funding for the Griffith Arterial, or Brisbane Urban Corridor. It's the Commonwealth that awards 22.1 per cent of national road network funding to Victoria even though the state has only 7 per cent of the national roads. Queensland receives only 24 per cent of funding despite having almost 22 per cent of the national roads, including neglected orphan child the Ipswich Motorway, scene of 1000 road accidents a year. Yet when called to comment on issues of traffic congestion in Brisbane, the federal Minister for Transport and Regional Services, Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile, refuses to be drawn into the debate, saying it is a matter for the Queensland state and local governments.
In Brisbane, the council looks after the suburban streets most of us live on. State government maintains the main connecting roads, such as Riverside Expressway, Gympie Road and Boundary Road, as well as roads that fall into the federal government's national highway network. The state plans, designs and supervises works on problem roads such as the Ipswich Motorway, the Pacific Motorway, the Bruce Highway and the Gateway Arterial, but the federal government provides the funding.
It's a bumper-riding, horn-honking intergovernmental mess and there is no silver bullet solution. But, in this room today, there appear to be ways out: congestion pricing, successful in London, where drivers are taxed for using popular roads at peak hour (but no government wants to be the one that enforces an extra, albeit necessary, tax that will fund infrastructure allowing untolled tunnels); an untolled comprehensive bypass and ring-road network; and, critically, upgrades to what is widely regarded as an inadequate public transport system.
The catch is, however, that each method must be used in harmony with the other. A tunnel and bridge system alone is not enough. "The whole idea is to change behaviour," says Willett. "If you don't provide decent alternatives, you simply raise a lot of money and cheese a lot of people off. You can only change behaviour with an attractive alternative." And there's another catch. The system will only work if the Commonwealth Government supports it. And that, as things stand, is indeed as likely as swine soaring through the clouds.
THE NEXT DAY, I CHANGE MY BEHAVIOUR. I DRIVE to the always-full Darra Railway Station car park and, in the absence of a parking space, reverse my car into a long-destroyed garden bed, stopping parallel to a Hilux and a Laser. Anything goes at this car park.
Hearing the sound of the 8.15am train, I sprint to Platform 3, my work shoes slipping on the gravel.
I've reached the ticket machine when the train pulls in. Panting, I tap in my destination: single, adult, Central. It costs me $3. That's $6 return. That's $42 a week. That's $2184 a year. I ferret for some coins.
A conductor leans out of the train. I give him a warm smile that says: "I know you always have to wait for idiots like me and I know I should have been here earlier but I couldn't find a park and if you could Find it in your heart to just hold the train for a few more seconds, I would be most grateful."
The conductor smiles back. Then his smile turns evil. He brings his whistle to his mouth and blows, signalling the train to leave. The machine spews my ticket out. I turn and sprint toward the train doors only to see them slam shut, leaving me to ponder my sad, deflated reflection in the door windows.
The conductor's smile returns as the train pulls away.
The 8.26am train is full. I'm standing, clutching a central handle bar, taking short, sharp breaths to avoid being overwhelmed by the exposed armpit of the man standing next to me. This is my life and it could use some deodorant. A young, freckle-faced girl is swearing in the seat next to me. "Tiffany," her mother yells. "Stop swearing, for f..k's sake."
"Graceville, Graceville Station," echoes the speaker system. "Dis-graceville Station," laughs Tiffany's older brother. "Yeah, Dis-graceville," laughs her dad.
Two years ago, I caught the train into the city for work every day. It was then rare to have to stand for the journey. Now it's a certainty. I took to driving because of the freedom a car offered during and after work. Also, the thing I liked most about catching the train, being able to read, is hard to do while standing.
"Toowong, Toowong Station," echoes the train speaker. "Too-wrong Station," laughs Tiffany's brother. "Yeah, Too-wrong," laughs Tiffany's dad.
It's 9.05am when I reach the fruit stand across from the GPO. The journey has taken 65 minutes. I buy an apple for $1, the same price as the newspaper I didn't get to read on the train.
At 7.38am the following day, I'm waiting for the 7.34am bus outside the Darra Railway Station. I prepare for my journey by reading On Board, Brisbane City Council's quarterly newsletter for bus lovers.
"Some friendly tips for catching the bus," it says.
"Please greet your driver (they will appreciate it)."
I'm practising my greeting when the brakes of hulking council bus 103 squeak to a halt. "Good morning," I say, wide-eyed and spirited. The bus driver - late-fifties, balding, possibly unconscious stares blankly. There is a five-second pause. "One adult to the city, please," I say, enthusiastic, hopeful.
The driver nods toward the train station. "Train," he says. "No, I'd like to catch the bus," I say.
"Train," he growls. "Quicker."
"Yes, but I just want to catch the bus." The driver looks me up and down. He stares at my packed work satchel. I join the dots: my bulging satchel, my eagerness to board the bus ... he must think I'm a terrorist. "Alright," he grumbles. "Three-forty."
The packed bus cuts through the suburban streets of Seventeen Mile Rocks. A high-school girl scribbles the word "Lisa-licious" on the seat in front of me. I change buses at Mt Omanney shopping centre, boarding the 7.49am city express.
At Indooroopilly, a woman in a Queensland Transport cardigan boards the bus. Her name is Jennifer. She's 40 and lives at Springfield Lakes. She left home this morning at 6.30am. She drives into Indooroopilly Shopping Centre, parks her car, then catches the bus into the city. "There's nowhere to park in the city," she says.
I catch the bus driver looking at me in his rearview mirror. Still driving, he turns his head around to talk. "Oi mate," he whispers. "Where ya from?" "The Courier-Mail," I say. "Come 'ere," he says, surreptitiously. I approach. He darts his head around like a fidgety police informant. "You should try this job for six months, mate," he says. "We're so understaffed it's not funny. It's a f..king nightmare." The driver pauses to let an elderly woman off the bus: "Thank you," he smiles. "Have a nice day." The bus doors close. "You're ****-scared," he resumes. "Sometimes you're driving 60-plus people. Cars are cutting you off. People are abusing you for being six minutes late. Drunks. Drug addicts. You should try it for six months. You wouldn't last."
PEOPLE ARE GENUINELY TRYING TO GET OUT OF their cars in Brisbane. In the year to December 2005, bus use in the city increased 13.7 per cent. But the bus network didn't grow in kind. And now there's "bus rage", caused when buses drive past stops displaying "sorry, bus full" signs. In August, The Courier-Mail reported that people were turned away at 240 bus and ferry stops each day across town.
After a circuitous journey covering most of western Brisbane, the bus turns into Elizabeth Street in the city. "Thanks mate," says the driver, opening the bus doors. "Have a nice day." Travelling from home to the GPO fruit stand has taken close to two hours. I contemplate buying an orange for $1, but decide to save my money for a packet of Panadol.
I search for alternatives. I find myself standing in a taxi queue at 2.30pm on a Friday outside the GPO. In taxi terms, that's black hole hour, when the morning shift drivers switch with the night shift. I've been standing here for 20 minutes, in a line 30strong and growing. Taxis go past without stopping.
We are the damned, short-ride passengers to be avoided in favour of suits waiting at the airport. After 40 minutes, I fall into the taxi of Dustin, a 34-yearold former retail salesman who's been driving cabs for two years, mostly in the city and Fortitude Valley.
"The city is gridlocked after 4pm," says Dustin, who's working tonight until 4am. "All through the inner city, it's like one big car park. It doesn't matter which side you're on, north or south, it's all bumpertobumper. You move for five minutes, then you stop for five minutes. It once took me an hour-and-a-half to get from Toowong into the city.
"It's getting painful. There's a lot of anger. There's no manners anymore. You indicate to change lanes and nobody lets you in. You can't do it. And horns: everybody's sitting on their horns."
Of course, cabbies don't mind traffic if a passenger is in the taxi. Dustin's taxi earns $1.50 per kilometre when it's moving and 60 cents a minute when it's stopped in traffic: now there's a clever solution to the traffic dilemma. The taxi home costs me $36.50 and takes about 40 minutes. Not bad. I once caught a peak-hour taxi to the airport that cost me $79.
Two days later, I'm getting desperate: I've hired an 18-speed Raceline bicycle for $50, plus $5 for a yellow Lance Armstrong wristband. I chose not to hire the colourful tights. I set off at 8am with my work clothes in a backpack. I check my breathing, building what cyclists call a cadence. Just ease into it.
Steady pedalling. Breathe in, breathe out. I've ridden 150m when I hit the wall. Crikey, I can still see my house - 16km to go. I check my route in my pocketsized Brisbane City Council bicycle path guide. I lumber to Jindalee to meet a bike path extending along Centenary Highway. Hills and valleys, hills and valleys. A cattle truck speeds past, maybe 30cm from my right shoulder. Its wind force pushes me into the gutter. This is madness. My tongue hangs from my mouth like a breathless dog's. Riders twice my age zoom past. Blurred vision, hallucinations, palpitations; 14km to go.
One ... more ... bloody ... hill and I'm speeding down the bike path. The wind blows against my face. Great, green rainforest trees flank the path. It's glorious. Air. Earth. Environment. To my left, cars are gridlocked along the Centenary Highway. Otis Redding enters my head: "Sittin' in the morning sun, I'll be sittin' when the evenin' comes". I nod hello to a fellow rider. He, too, wears a Lance Armstrong wristband. He nods hello back. We are bonded, he and I, through the joys of traffic-free workday travelling, and through cool rubber wristbands. The path cuts through Toowong and winds along the river. I'm seeing things I've never seen: the underside of the William Jolly Bridge; a waterfall flowing beneath the Riverside Expressway. I watch birds flying in arrow shapes, the shadows of clouds creeping along the river. I pull the bike up at the GPO fruit stand and check my watch. The journey has taken me 80 minutes. That's five minutes longer than the journey by car. Just imagine if I'd worn tights.
I'm spent. I need to eat. I buy a banana, hoping our accountant will agree it's within our budget.
The trip was exhilarating. But in reality, me cycling 32km to and from work each day is as likely as Campbell Newman introducing a new transport network built around jet-propelled backpacks (though I'm betting he's considered it).
When dealing with Brisbane traffic congestion, one must consider what Brisbane-based town planner Juergen Hanisch calls "real-world" options. Hanisch has written a paper called TransApex - A Glance Over the Shoulder Before Moving Ahead. The reality, he says, is that the Commonwealth Government does not accept responsibility for urban congestion.
"Brisbane City Council must operate in the world as it is, not as it should be." In a perfect world, we would be travelling on a well-funded, reliable and environmentally friendly public transport system.
The vast amount of goods that will service Brisbane's burgeoning population in the next 20 years would be transported along wide corridors that were planned 50 years ago by far-sighted politicians. But this is the real world, a place where transport alternatives are like frying pans and fires and governments are often enticed by the easiest solution of all: doing nothing.
And then, meltdown. At 4.30pm on Tuesday, October 17, Transport and Main Roads Minister Paul Lucas closes the Riverside Expressway. A crack two metres long and 0.4mm wide - has been found on the Ann Street on-ramp to the expressway. In the potential event of the ramp collapsing, 150,000 expressway motorists are forced to find alternative routes home. But the alternatives aren't there. They haven't been built yet. Brisbane's roads are paralysed.
A whole city - Australia's third-largest - is drowning in the belly of the suck. As the sun goes down, the city is aglow with the red brake lights of cars reversing, nudging and bumping in a confused, three-hour-long state of disbelief. It takes 30 minutes to drive through Fortitude Valley to the Story Bridge. The Centenary Highway is throbbing. On Bowen Bridge Road, road rules have been thrown out the window: cars are exiting lanes and driving on the wrong side of the road to escape. The council's bus fleet is overwhelmed.
People are boarding ferries like migrants fleeing a war-ravaged state. Beep, bloody beep.
The next morning, I'm back where I started.
Ipswich Motorway, 8am, a slave to the suck. Life has stopped, but time has skipped merrily on down the road. An electronic Main Roads traffic sign flashes a message: "R'side Expressway Closed. Use Story Bridge." From the radio, political voices bounce around my car. "We're treating this like a bushfire or flood," says Mayor Newman. "It's an emergency."
"I'd like to apologise to south-east Queenslanders for the inconvenience they're suffering," Paul Lucas says. "I'm sorry that this has happened," Peter Beattie says.
Before the Story Bridge, after driving for one hour and 45 minutes, I look across six lanes of gridlock. A man in a white van rolls a cigarette.
A woman in a blue Ford Falcon rests her head on her palm while her two kids bicker in the back seat.
A woman in a red Commodore alights from her car and retrieves a backpack from her boot. Now there's an idea: what if we all got out of our cars?
We could slam our doors, lock our cars and leave them where they are. Then, together, we could gather on the Riverside Expressway - 150,000 motorists filling every inch of that overworked and underfunded artery - and demand that our local, state and federal leaders work together to solve Brisbane's traffic dilemma.
But this is the real world. The woman hops back in her car. She puts her seatbelt on, shakes her head and smiles. We're not going anywhere.
