Toowoomba mayor calls for 50-cent bus trial to link city with Brisbane
Toowoomba leaders have called for 50-cent bus service trial to Brisbane, as the Garden City ramps up its push for a full passenger rail service.
Toowoomba should become part of southeast Queensland’s “50-cent region” now, with leaders and transport advocates calling for the government to trial linking the city to Brisbane with low-cost bus fares ahead of new passenger rail services by 2032.
As momentum gathers on exploring a fresh Garden City passenger train proposal to service two fast-growing regions, a new plan has emerged that would showcase the demand for that now by running 50-cent bus services from Toowoomba to Rosewood station.
It comes just days after The Chronicle and Toowoomba council’s successful rail roundtable at City Hall on Thursday, which has resulted in the funding of a new study on extending the Ipswich/Rosewood line to Withcott before running bus services up the range.
While proponents want to see passenger rail delivered in time for the Olympic Games, Mayor Geoff McDonald has thrown his support behind the idea of trialling 50-cent co-ordinate bus services to Rosewood, with passengers then linking up with rail to get to Brisbane.
Currently, the only way to get from Toowoomba to Brisbane apart from a car is on private coaches run by Murrays or Greyhound, the tickets for which can cost between $24 and $45.
Mr McDonald said a government-funded trial of 50-cent bus fares between Toowoomba and Rosewood, either with its own buses or by subsidising a private service, would gauge interest from residents for having passenger rail.
“You can go from Gympie into Brisbane on a TransLink bus or a train for 50 cents — so is it not unreasonable in a connected SEQ to think that a conversation shouldn’t take place about having Toowoomba into Brisbane (connected) with 50 cents?” he said.
“It’s still Toowoomba into Roma Street in Brisbane but it’s a co-ordinated service, (with) a bus from Toowoomba, go through Gatton and pick up Plainlands and then go through to Rosewood.
“So it’s not in complete competition with private enterprise, it’s a separate service that could then work.”
Toowoomba is the only region included in the state government’s 2023 Shaping SEQ Regional Plan that is also not connected to Brisbane with 50-cent fares — either by train or bus.
That plan is predicting the Toowoomba and Lockyer Valley regions will welcome an extra 100,000 people over the next 20 years, something Mr McDonald said the LNP needed to address with public connectivity solutions.
“We have no control over (whether we’re considered part of SEQ) — we are part of the Shaping SEQ regional plan, (and) if we are, well our community should get an advantage of that and a 50 cent connected SEQ makes perfect sense,” he said.
“We’re talking about the 50 cent region (and) our community should have the benefit of that, so therefore let’s think about that as an option to test and trial this notion and as the population grows those numbers will grow.”
Advocacy group Better Transport Queensland has backed a fully-connected 50-cent region that included Toowoomba, with spokesman Paul Guard arguing the city’s public transport needs had been “forgotten”.
“Toowoomba has been more or less forgotten in the public transport landscape in Queensland and needs to be put on the map,” he said.
“It really is unfair for Toowoomba to be missing out on that low-cost connection when you compare it to every other similarly-sized city within cooee of a capital city.
“If you simply had transit services to Toowoomba that were frequent and reliable, even if it was two hours, that would still be huge and give you a massive increase in usage of the service as well.”
Since the roundtable, Mr McDonald said the Ipswich City Council has joined the campaign for passenger rail to Toowoomba, with the belief it could boost public transport for all communities.
Ipswich mayor Theresa Harding was contacted for comment.
160km/h: Advocacy group backs ‘higher-speed rail’ to Toowoomba
Toowoomba could easily connected to services as fast as the famous Tilt Train if it can establish a passenger rail corridor, a leading public transport advocacy organisation has claimed.
Better Transport Queensland (BTQ) has thrown its support behind a new push to extend the Rosewood/Ipswich rail line to Withcott, which is the subject of a new study commissioned by the Toowoomba and Lockyer Valley councils.
Under the proposal, passengers would take a bus from Toowoomba to an interlink station dubbed The Range, which would then run train services through to Brisbane.
Modelling by The Chronicle estimates such a journey would take two hours and 20 minutes (140 mins) to complete at an average train speed of 61km/h (including dwell time at stations) with stops at Helidon, Gatton and Laidley included (based on distances as the crow flies).
However, the journey drops to 126 minutes if the train can reach average speeds of 80km/h along the new section, and under two hours at 100km/h.
Even the slowest average speed modelled, if borne out, would make a 50-cent train to Brisbane comparable to driving during peak traffic periods right now.
BTQ spokesman Paul Guard said Translink’s current passenger rail network would actually be mostly capable, with some adjustments, of handling speeds similar to the Tilt Train, which runs the North Coast line and holds the current record for Australian commuter rolling stock.
He said while the new proposal was important to establish the corridor, he believed “higher speed rail” (trains up to 200km/h) needed to be the long-term goal.
“BTQ would support that as a first step and a good option for getting around the obvious bottleneck (of) the high cost of a rail link through the Toowoomba range, which will obviously need to happen at some point but might take longer to achieve fruition,” Mr Guard, a former Toowoomba resident, said.
“Reducing the travel time would be critical for making (rail) competitive with the alternative of private cars and it is true that most of the alignment is already fairly amenable to higher speeds.
“It’s the Little Liverpool Range (in the Lockyer Valley) that would be the large impediment, which would need a huge tunnel, but apart from that the potential for at least reserving a corridor that would support high-speed travel, and over time developing that into a full 160km per hour route would be feasible.
“There’s a lot of evidence that the existing electric narrow gauge infrastructure that we have in Queensland can support those tilt train speeds.”
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Originally published as Toowoomba mayor calls for 50-cent bus trial to link city with Brisbane
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