I beat Brisbane's peak-hour traffic with muffins and coffee
My daily commute takes less than a minute as I shuffle from the couch where I take my morning coffee in the library upstairs, to the desk in my word-nerd cave downstairs where I search every day for new ways to describe explosions or zombies or an exciting combination of both.
A couple of times a week though, I have to deliver somebody else to work or school and the commute becomes real.
Fare increases the past five or six years make it feel as though you now pay the old-fashioned way, handing over a big wedge of the folding stuff every week.
Photo: AlamyReal enough that when I can avoid Brisbane traffic, I will.
Not by taking public transport. What am I, crazy?
But by sitting out peak hour in a cafe somewhere, or last week in the library at UQ.
Between about 6.30 and maybe a quarter to nine in the morning, there’s no point being on the road.
It’s a crawl every which way. Better to laager up at Pourboy and wash down their excellent muffins with the best coffee in the city. (Seriously, come at me. I’ll fight you.)
Campbell Newman — Remember him? Little guy? Liked to cosplay the Incredible Hulk? — thought he could HULK SMASH his way through the city’s gridlock by punching giant transport tubes under the earth.
But I’ve driven in those tunnels. They’re impressive feats of engineering, and great fun to use because they’re mostly free of other drivers.
Nobody wants to pay 10 bucks for their daily commute on top of the cost of running a car.
No normal punter, anyway.
Even somebody who works for themselves and can quantify exactly how much money they’re losing by sitting in a traffic jam for an hour or so will quickly grow tired of the little beep from the Go Via tag telling them they’re down another five bucks.
And public transport?
It used to be that you paid in the extra time it took to get anywhere.
A bus ride was cheaper than running a car, and you didn’t have to pay for or even think about parking at the other end, but you were subject to the vagaries of the network and the unavoidable loss of your time by the need to service other passengers.
Fare increases the past five or six years make it feel as though you now pay the old-fashioned way as well, handing over a big wedge of the folding stuff every week for the questionable convenience of fighting for a seat on overcrowded buses and trains which might turn up on time.
Or not.
Monday’s report that increasing numbers of Brisneylanders are getting back into their cars, even as daily commute times grow longer (and the price of running that car goes up and up, to say nothing of the environmental cost) seems to suggest that whatever the state and local governments are doing with public transport isn’t working.
You can see the desperate, makeshift ploys to patch up an over-strained road network.
The weird and ultimately pointless effort to widen Wynnum Road is a great example, destroying dozens of homes to move the choke point of the daily traffic snarl a couple of hundred metres away further out into the suburbs.
I don’t pretend to have an answer.
I suspect we’re doomed by our addiction to private transport.
Maybe 30 or 40 years from now fleets of self-driving cars will provide on-demand wheels via an app but well before then this city is going to strangle itself.
Could public transport help?
Hell yeah.
But the investment needed would be so great that you can bet somebody would decide there were votes to be had in trashing the very idea of it.
John Birmingham is a columnist and blogger for the Brisbane Times. He is also an award winning magazine writer and the author of Leviathan, the Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, which won the National Award for Non-Fiction. He amuses himself in his down time by writing novels which improve with altitude.
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