Southeast Queesland's TransLink zones.

Southeast Queesland's TransLink zones. Photo: TransLink


Professor Peter Newman, who heads a sustainability and urban planning unit at Western Australia's Curtin University, questioned why the region had 23 public transport zones.

"I don't feel there is any efficiency gains by having so many different zones," Professor Newman said.

"It would be simpler to have three or four at the most."

TransLink's 23 zones run in roughly concentric circles stretching out from Brisbane. Noosa, in the north is in zone 23, Coolangatta in the south is in zone 18 and Helidon in the west is in zone 16.

"These things [zoning systems] just grow as the cities grow and it is a bit of a relic in my view," Professor Newman, a board member of Infrastructure Australia, said yesterday.

"And the impact is confusion and time-waste, which is everything in public transport."

Professor Newman said availability, rather than price, was primarily behind falling patronage in southeast Queensland.

"People will pay," he said. London, for example, has appalling prices for their train system. It breaks even because they are charging so much that it does break even.

"But it is just extraordinary the amount of growth they have in their system, because it is so hard to get around in the city by car."

Professor Newman said changes to better link Brisbane's middle and outer suburbs to rail lines had to be considered.

A major investment in parking at Melbourne's suburban rail stations had led to a big boost in rail patronage, he said.

"It grew nearly 90 per cent in five years. That was just in the outer suburbs of Melbourne," Professor Newman said.

Professor Newman said Brisbane's popular inner-suburbs - built before WWII - were developed "around public transport", while suburbs built between the late 1950s and the 1990s, were "built around the car", and the new outer suburbs were almost completely reliant on cars.

He said recent decisions to build rail lines to Redcliffe, north of Brisbane, and Springfield, to the west, were beneficial.

However, Professor Newman said the city should prioritise getting an extra Brisbane River rail crossing, which could be the Cross River Rail project.

"Brisbane is not just ready for an underground rail system, it is essential," he said.

"You can't just keep adding on extra bits at the end of the rail system because they are just clogging up in the central point."

Professor Newman was contacted after being referred to among hundreds of suggestions from readers about public transport covering issues including fares and zones, the future of Cross River Rail, frequency versus price, and examples from other cities and busways.