ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A week-long investigation by The Advocate’s ‘Floodlight‘ team has found that the proposed Brisbane Metro is just a very long bus that will replace the current buses on the city’s iconic busways.
Rather than needlessly spend billions of dollars trying to dig through the greywacke, phyllite, schist, quartzite, chert, shale and sandstone that sits under the suburbs, the Queensland Government has decided to simply improve what they have.
The report, which was leaked to Floodlight by a disgruntled former public servant, concluded that having many large capacity electric buses which ran at a high frequency is ‘pretty much’ what a Metro is.
Many in Brisbane were excited that the River City was soon to receive its own ‘driverless’ Metro service like the one Sydney has just unveiled. However, this report says otherwise.
Public perceptions around the bus service in Brisbane are actually better, according to the report, than any other mode of mass transit infrastructure including the train service. This lead to the government coming to the conclusion that Brisbane people are ‘bus people’.
Carindale Heights man Bennett Brett told reporters he was disappointed to learn the new Metro is just a new bus that can ‘bend both ways’.
He also rejects the ‘bus people’ label in the report.
“I will just buy a car now,” he said.
“Getting the bus is already a supremely dehumanising experience, now they want to cram 250 of us in one bus. Imagine if he crashed the thing. It’d be like stomping on the end of a tube of toothpaste,”
“You might call me a city [homophobic slur removed by legal] but I reckon a Sydney-style [homophobic slur removed by legal] Metro system would go off in Brisbane.”
More to come.
