I’ve been doing a fairly lengthy commuter drive for the past few weeks — well, lenghty for Brisbane, anyway — and have come to some tentative conclusions.
Traffic congestion and public transport (or lack thereof) are a hot topic in Brisbane these days. It’s something that erupts into the public arena every few years, with dire predictions that south-east Queensland is going to resemble the Los Angeles basin within the next decade.
Generally the problems are blamed on poor road design and poor public transport. These are both valid complaints, but at least part of the blame is on lousy drivers.
I will readily admit that a very major part of Brisbane’s traffic problems is that essentially all the major arteries are radial — all leading to the central business district and the cluster of river crossings there — as are the bulk of public transport routes. Their are many problems with this: a lot of traffic travelling across the city is funneled through choke points in the center of town; the tidal flow of public transport is only effective at delivering people to the central areas; and the further out you go, the further you are likely to be from public transport.
Oddly enough, the roads are generally pretty good. Apart from some choke points, the radial routes work well. Equally, the public transport works pretty well, as long as you’re fairly close to town, and travelling to and from town.
I’ve noticed a few intersections that just don’t work at all. They’re major choke points, in some cases through bad design, in other places for no readily apparent reason. Some of them seem to be choke points through simple queueing problems, such as turn lanes filling up and overflowing (thus blocking through lanes) because cars arrive faster than they leave. Waterworks Road right into Hale St is a good example of this, as is the intersection of South Pine Road and Stafford Road. A more pathological case occurs in several places where major routes going across town meet the radial routes.
In theory, you’d expect that you could do something like Paris, and put concentric ring-roads that cross the radial routes. Or you could do something like Brisbane, and only have small segments of ring-roads, forcing all the traffic down the radial routes. The worst example of this on my morning route is at the other end of Stafford Road where, in order to cross the highway, you have to travel with the inbound flow of traffic down the highway for 200 meters before you can get off onto the next bit of the cross town route. Needless to say, this area is a parking lot in the morning, and you can expect to spend about ten minutes getting through. The really, really daft thing about this is that the route when you turn left off the highway is this silly twisty-back-street-suburban-rat-run which is, in fact, the main route to the airport. It’s not even as though it’s a particularly direct run. When you get to the other end of it, you turn left for onto another major radial route for a couple of hundred meters. The only good thing is that this is against the tidal flow, so it goes very smoothly.
The worst intersection, though, is at the other end of the humourously named East West Arterial Road. When the traffic is light, this can be a weird kilometer or so, where you rip along an almost empty two-lane viaduct then come to a grinding halt at a set of traffic lights set 50 meters in front of a roundabout. In heavy traffic, you’ll find yourself at the tail end of a 500 meter parking lot. Because of the slowness of traffic entering the roundabout (more on that below), combined with the stop/start of the traffic lights, it can easily take ten minutes to get through the roundabout.
So. Two bad design issues here: cross-axial routes that don’t connect, and intersections whose function is to stop traffic cold, rather than facilitate it’s movement. I’ll add a third, that doesn’t stop traffic cold, but slows it down by adding choke points: a great number of roads arbitarily switch between two lanes and one lane and back again, or else suddenly turn one of the lanes into a turning lane.
On the other hand, if you travel through these areas in the dead of night, these design and route problems don’t cause any inconvenience. The only reason they cause clogged arteries is some really bad habits of Brisbane drivers:
- they drive too close together, particularly in heavy traffic. The problem with this is that any minor delay or slow-down translates to a complete stop in the traffic flow a few dozen vehicles back. Even worse, if the roads are slick and wet, a minor slow-down can translate into a multi-car pile-up;
- they don’t know how to merge. This is partly a by-product of driving too close together, which means that the main stream of traffic leaves no gaps for vehicles from the secondary stream to join. But there is also a tendency for drivers to slow down, rather than accelerate, when they merge. This means that places where traffic merge are choke points both for the main stream of traffic and for the joining stream. Take a look at the south-bound entry onto the freeway at Wooloongabba of an evening, if you don’t believe me;
- they don’t know how to use roundabouts. Again, this is partly a by-product of driving too close together, meaning that there can be lengthy runs of vehicles going through with no gaps for entry. Mainly it’s because Brisbane drivers treat roundabouts as stop signs, often coming to a complete halt before entering them, even if they’re empty!
- they are painfully bad at starting off smartly at traffic lights. Quite apart from a tendency to slow down as they approach green lights, Brisbane drivers are very bad at starting off when the lights go from red to green. The problem is that they tend not to start moving, or even put the car in gear, until the car in front is well underway. This means that in heavy traffic only a very small number of vehicles get through on each cycle. I won’t mention the lunatics who stop half-way through an intersection because they can’t enter the clogged road on the other side, because I don’t believe that’s a Brisbane-only characteristic.
So, if you’re migrating to Brisbane and want to fit right in, there are certain ways of driving you need to adopt. First, the heavier the traffic, the closer you have to drive to the car in front. Second, come to a complete halt at roundabouts, give-way signs, green lights, minor wiggles in the road and interesting trees. Third, never, ever start moving at a red light until the car in front has gone all the way through the intersection, and don’t forget to slow down as you approach the green light in case it changes. Finally, despite the laws about merging, if cars in adjacent lanes attempt to merge, refuse to let them join in.
Here endeth the rant, probably the first in a series.