Innovation against congestion.

Congestion is one of the major problems that traffic engineers and planners are asked to deal with. In the past the most commonly proposed and adopted solution to congestion was the design and construction of new roads. New urban motorways and arterials shaped the way that our cities look and operate but failed to address the problem at the longer term since there was a parameter that was never thought off. Raging induced traffic soon clogged the new arterials or the added lanes on the urban motorways. Now, scientists even say that adding traffic lanes can even reduce overall performance.

And while this effect is not always recognised by politicians who seemed to prefer planning and designing for cars and not for people, the new political shift to cutting down state debt and deficit, meant that there were no longer huge amount of money for big transport infrastructure projects. But still the desire to deal with congestion remains as drivers lose time, waiting in stand still conditions while they are trying to get to and back from work every day. And since commuter traffic has two peaks within each day, going towards the city centre every morning and away from it towards the suburbs each afternoon, using the empty lanes and the surplus capacity on the opposite direction was a sensible thing that a few transport agencies tried to explore.

 

Source

Greek traffic police change the direction of a lane by placing “witches hats”. This is a measure that they use on rare occasions though; usually on long weekends and big public holidays like Easter and Christmas. This mass movement is called by the Greek media “the exodus” and “the return”.  Friday afternoon, highways that connect Athens and even Thessaloniki to the rest of Greece get an extra lane on the outbound directions and this is reversed on the day that everyone returns back home at the end of the long weekend. This is quite labour intensive and that’s why it’s not considered feasible for an everyday, commuter type solution.

There is a mechanical alternative to this treatment. It’s called “zipper” or barrier transfer machine as is the correct technical term. The zipper is a customised heavy vehicle used to transfer concrete lane dividers shifting a lane to be used for the opposite direction. Back in 2001, in the I-95 highway in Richmond, USA these machines were quite large and very slow moving. 

Source: Roads to the future

In 2013 zippers got a lot smaller and a lot quicker as shown in this video from I-15 in San Diego, USA.

The concrete barriers which can weigh almost half a tonne are linked together by metal connectors and are not anchored in the ground. This requirement creates a lot of constraints and limits its application in road sections that meet such conditions. Wide medians are excluded so are concrete barriers with lighting poles between them.  

Pacific Motorway, Tanah Merah, QLD

A simpler solution is having reversible lanes without any hard separation but rather than with just variable message signs like the one shifting the middle lane in Queens Road in Melbourne.

Queens Rd, Melbourne, Victoria

Innovative, clever solutions provide value for money but in order to achieve large scale benefits, a paradigm shift is necessary. Shifting away from car traffic and towards public transport and active travel and supporting this change with not only the funding but also the ingenuity that traffic engineers and planners have proven they possess.

BRT or LRT? Busway or Light Rail?

Few days ago I went back to the Gold Coast for a technical seminar on the new Light Rail Project that is now under construction there. The stage one of the project will cost $ 1 billion to deliver a 13 km route between the Gold Coast University Hospital and Broadbeach. This new public transportation system will commence operations in 2014 well ahead of the Commonwealth Games that Gold Coast will host in 2018. The system in this first stage will consist of 14 trams and 16 stations and it is expected to move 50,000 passengers a day with a capacity to cater for up to 75,000 passengers a day.

The trams are constructed by Bombardier and are 43.5 metres long, 2.65 metres wide and can travel at speeds up to 70 km/h. The trams are the latest generation of FLEXITY 2 Light Rail Vehicles that are used in Croydon and Docklands in London, Nottingham and Manchester, Blackpool and Lancashire. The unique feature for the Gold Coast trams will be of course the Surfboard racks.

This new system will be the first light rail system in Queensland. Previous attempts to propose planning and construction of such a system in Queensland’s capital city Brisbane were unsuccessful. Public spending in transportation is directed to the bus system like the CityGlider and CityCats. 

In the traffic engineering – transportation planning community there is a big and long standing debate on the benefits of light rail systems against bus rapid transit systems. The BRT or busway as they are called in Australia is at the moment the preferred choice in Brisbane. Personally I am not sure that there is a clearly superior system between the two. Probably it depends on the urban environment and the characteristics that those systems are to be designed and operate. And while busways are usually less expensive to implement and more flexible and adaptive to changes, the light rail systems give the city a world class image lift and support residential and commercial development along its stations.  

After all, the way busways work in Brisbane, some times they give the impression that we do have a light rail.

  

Commuting from Gold Coast to Brisbane - Part 2. What people do?

My last post was about my impressions of commuting by train from Gold Coast to Brisbane. It is indeed very slow and uncomfortable and that is why the majority of people do not use it. But there is a big number of people living in the Gold Coast and working in Brisbane and a not so big but still significant number of people commuting the other way. So what all these people do every day?

Well I suppose for the people living in Brisbane and working in Gold Coast is fairly easy. They drive each day through the M1 Motorway and find a relatively easy and cheap parking spot in Gold Coast.

But how about people from Gold Coast working in Brisbane? Here is what they do:

First option: They drive to Brisbane but not to the CBD because of the very expensive parking. Instead they drive just outside the limits of the traffic control areas and try to find a free on street parking space.

The most popular areas for this are: Lower West End and Highgate Hill, Buranda, Stones Corner, Norman Park, Coorparoo.

Second option: They drive to one of the many park and ride spaces that Citytrain provides in the suburbs and then take the train. Popular Southeast stations for park’n’ride:

Fairfeild, Yeronga, Yeerongpilly, Moorooka and some Northeast stations like Buranda, Coorparoo and Norman Park.

Third option: They drive to different inner suburbs and then park illegally wherever they think they have better chances of not getting fined.

Of course there are quite a few other options that people follow in order to move from their place of living to the place of work.

But of course all these options are not viable sustainable transportation. They create lots of troubles to people on those Brisbane suburbs and at the end of the day they don’t save that much time and money for commuters.

Commuting by train Gold Coast to Brisbane. Captain Slow is on the driver’s seat

Having to commute every day from Gold Coast to Brisbane I experience first hand the good and the bad of commuting by train. First let me give you some useful data:

The distance from Surfers Paradise to Brisbane CBD is around 77 kilometres and driving through the M1 motorway or as they call it Pacific motorway will take you less than an hour. That is even in peek hours but not when you run onto a road accident that is quite common in M1 motorway which is very heavy on traffic and is considered one of the most dangerous highways in Australia regarding accidents. In those cases total travel time might be as long as two and a half hours.  Plus if you go by car in Brisbane city centre then you have to pay a small fortune every month for parking.

So this is a great opportunity to develop the  sustainable and environmental friendly solution of train commuting. But unfortunately train is not that popular in South East Queensland. And if this is not the case for the people living here, it certainly is the case for the decision makers. And let me explain this:

The rail line that connects Gold Coast (in general and not Surfers Paradise) with Brisbane City Centre is almost 90 kilometres long making a journey from Surfers Paradise to Brisbane a total of one hour and a half.

  That is about 20 minutes by car to Nerang Station -where fortunately there is a free commuter parking- and then 70 minutes from there to Central Station in Brisbane. If we consider the rail distance from Nerang Station to Brisbane Central Station is 75,9 kilometres, that makes the average train speed 65 kilometres per hour. Did you say slow? Actually it is slow,  regarding all train standards and not just highspeed rail. 

But I am afraid that is not the only drawback keeping commuters away from the Gold Coast train. The train is not comfortable at all; The seats are like the ones that you expect from a metro train and not from a suburban train not to mention an intercity train. Certainly if you want to catch an early morning snooze or a late afternoon nap then you must do that on a sitting straight position with the fear of banging your head somewhere.

"Ok I can not sleep but can I use this time to work in my laptop?"  Bad luck again. No tables at all and not enough space to have it even on your lap. 

"How about wireless internet connection?" Only a small number of the trains have that and not in every car. And when you are lucky enough to be in one of those then there is a time limit and a limit in what you can access. So, no youtube videos or other streaming media.

But even you are someone that does not care for all this and you just enjoy reading a good book during trip time then you should take care where you board the train. Almost all trains during the peak hours run full so for the most part of the trip there are a lot of standing passengers. Add to that that the trip frequency is not good having only 3 trains from Gold Coast between 7-8 am and only 5 trains between 7-9 am. 

In one of my next posts I will write about what people commuting from Gold Coast to Brisbane do and what they can do with a little help from state government and the two city councils.