Brisbane Metro will be missing key tunnel, busway upgrades at launch

One of the tunnels dug for the Brisbane City Council’s $1.2 billion Metro project will not be finished in time for its “soft launch” and key upgrades to the Cultural Centre station, Victoria Bridge and Buranda Busway will also be incomplete.

Further details of the council’s flagship project aired this week revealed the full funding set aside for its 60 articulated buses, and that a pilot vehicle was not expected to make it onto existing city busways until at least early next year.

Concept images showing the planned entrance at North Quay for the Brisbane Metro Adelaide Street tunnel, not expected to be finished until May 2024.Credit: Brisbane City Council

The developments follow a series of delays, cost blowouts and state government interventions since the project was announced in 2016 to ease inner-city bus network congestion.

The council budget handed down last week showed more than half the project’s remaining cost – $540 million – was not projected until the 2023-24 and 2024-25 financial years, prompting councillors to probe public and active transport committee chair Ryan Murphy on its progress on Monday.

“We anticipate the commencement of the project will be essentially a soft launch,” he said.

“So services will start, drivers will need to be trained, passengers will need to slowly integrate with the new experience ... it will be a progressive rollout.”

Cr Murphy said construction on the Adelaide Street link, which will allow high-frequency buses to travel below the surface between the Victoria Bridge and King George Square busway, was now likely to take about 18 months, with an extra six months of additional work to finalise it.

“We’re expecting construction on the tunnel to start in late 2021, with completion due in May of 2024,” he said.

The council will reheat its push for the Cultural Centre station to go underground if Brisbane’s 2032 Olympic bid is successful, after long-running disagreements with the state about the design and location forced an agreement on a street-level upgrade.

Asked about progress on the station, Cr Murphy said the council hoped to finalise plans within a year but said talk about any extra costs for a move back underground needed to wait for a Games decision in July.

An above-ground Cultural Centre station upgrade was expected to be finished in early 2024. Work is also expected to be ongoing along the Victoria Bridge and Buranda Busway, when buses begin entering service primarily on the Metro 1 route between Eight Mile Plains and Roma Street.

Arrival of the pilot vehicle for testing around the city has been pushed back to at least early 2022 due to COVID-19 disruptions faced by Switzerland-based contractor HESS.

Asked by Labor council opposition leader Jared Cassidy how much was being paid for the vehicles, Cr Murphy said a total of $252 million had been budgeted.

Excluding contingency funds, the design, manufacture and delivery costs were still expected to reach the $190 million figure flagged when the council announced the change to an electrified fleet in 2019.

A staged review and planning for bus network changes, to be undertaken with TransLink and other public transport operators, was expected to start in 2022.

Speaking during the budget debate on Wednesday, Cr Cassidy said the claimed increase in capacity would come from busway changes, not “60 banana buses”.

Responding to questions from this masthead, Cr Murphy said the project’s budget had not changed since the delays caused by “political interference” by the state government.

“However, we have put that behind us, and the project is now progressing well towards major construction commencing this coming financial year,” he said.

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