Yes, it appears that many of Brisbane's ferry terminals are gone …
… but the boats themselves were saved. Buses are replacing ferries, we're told, though buses can't do much without bridges.
Floods this major don't often happen in developed-world cities. If you're interested in the recriminations phase, Kerwin Datu has a good overview in the Global Urbanist.
Photo: Robert Shakespeare, Brisbane Times
Well, sooner or later, you'll have to sell to the next generation, so it makes sense to be paying attention to what they think.
Nearmap.com has posted a complete layer of aerial images of Brisbane, take on the 13th when the flood was near its peak. Here's Milton, featuring the flooded Suncorp Stadium near the top of the image.
Panning just to the southeast, here's a bit of South Brisbane.
There's quite a bit of transit news in this image. The bridge in the upper right is the Victoria Bridge, which normally carries buses in exclusive lanes between the CBD (off to the upper right) and the entrance to the South East Busway, which is just west of the railroad tracks. Just at the west end of the bridge you can make out a pair of of platforms, which are Cultural Centre station. The street is flooded just west of that station, so it's clear that at the height of the flood the bridge, the station, and this part of the busway were all out of service.
The building immedately north of the bridge is the Queensland Art Gallery, the main art museum, which fortunately had time to move its collection to upper floors. South of the bridge you can see the floodwaters invading the Southbank entertainment precinct.
This next image is further east. It has the CBD on the west edge, then Kangaroo Point with the Story Bridge, then New Farm in the image's eastern half:
Near the center of the image you can see what looks like a piece of white string in the water, just off the northern shore. That's the remains of the Riverwalk's floating segment. Pieces north and south are now missing.
Nearmap.com's excellent images can be explored just as you'd explore Google Maps, and their images of Australia are consistently sharper than Google's. If you're in Brisbane, and don't want to be reviled as a "rubbernecker" visiting the flooded areas and getting in the way, explore the flood on Nearmap instead. If you're not in Brisbane, well, be glad of the fact.
Transit planning consultant Bob Bourne is thinking about the Brisbane flood's impact, and wondering whether building more redundancy into transit networks is a good idea:
My heart goes out to everyone affected by the floods. It can be devastating on so many levels, individual lives lost; extensive property damage to individual residences, and infrastructure damage. I managed the system in Ames, IA during our floods in 1990, 1993, 1998, and 2005 and I have been assisting the Cedar Rapids, IA transit system in recovering from their 2008 floods. I worked in Chicago during the blizzard winters of 1977-78 and 1978-79 where the city and suburbs experienced several weeks of paralysis due to the continuous heavy snows as well as way too many blizzards in Iowa over the years.In the U.S. buses typically operate without a lot of redunancy in the route network. Your commentary on numbering overlapping bus routes and make them understandable to the riding public is interesting and implies that there are lots of routes serving several corridors. In the U.S. that may be true, but usually the headways are pretty well trimmed to provide the absolute minimal level of service. When you add demand due to adjacent services becoming inoperative, the existing routes are overwhelmed. Overloading causes extended travel times and buses cannot make their normal cycle times which exacerbates the problem. Throw in a street network in chaos and the bus system will be criticized as not meeting the needs of the citizens in the time of crisis. No easy way to explain the problem.The other problem that we had in Ames, Chicago, and Cedar Rapids was that some of the drivers lived in areas that were flooded or had immediate family in those areas. They needed to tend to their family/housing priorities and this decreased the number of people available when the workload of more passengers and longer travel times increases.At some time in the future, after everything settles, perhaps you could solicit comments on building redundancy into your transit system. Sometimes, it is good to have lightly used routes that can be cancelled in a crisis allowing redeployment of drivers and vehicles. Sometimes it is good to have headways with a loading standard of less than 125% of seats at the peak point on the route instead of cramming buses with 150% or 175% of seated load. Your 10 or 12 minute frequent headway concept can provide additional resources if you need to cut it back to 15 to 20 minutes during a crisis.After the September 11, 2001 disaster in New York, the subway system was able to recover quickly because the lower end of Manhattan was one of the few places in the subway system where there was some redundancy. Multiple routes close to each other and at the end of some routes made it easy for commuters to resume their normal lives long before the reconstruction of the subway damage.Redundancy is not favored by policy makers and can add to costs. However, a system with excess capacity will perform well in times of crisis and will provide addtional service during normal times.Our prayers are with everyone who is suffering through this disaster and we hope that good luck will shine on Australia again.
The kind of redundancy that Bob praises is something transit planners spend much of their time trying to get rid of, because on typical days when we don't need it as redundancy, we call it duplication and waste.
Transit agencies work on such tight budgets that it doesn't make sense to run, say, a bus line next to a rail line, doing the same thing, just for the redundancy. If the rail line is serving the market, the bus should be off somewhere else, providing unique mobility rather than duplicating the rail.
This is especially true in small cities like Bob's hometown of Ames, Iowa, or Great Falls, Montana. These networks' resources are stretched tightly to create the maximum amount of mobility for the budget.
Having said that, there are a few situations where an efficient network is also a redundant one.
Classic high-frequency grids provide redundancy for transit in the same way they do for cars. If one segment in a grid goes down, there's a parallel line 800m away that you can walk to in a pinch. It will probably allow you to complete the same L-shaped trip that you intended to make on the disabled line.
Ferries are more complicated. The long cross-city run of the CityCats mostly connects stations that are also connected by bus. The bus trip generally runs a shorter distance at a higher frequency, though it may require a connection. So there's no question that the intrinisic attraction of the ferry is part of what keeps it busy. There may also be secondary issues, like the legibility problems of much of the bus system in downtown Brisbane, where most connections occur. But there are also situations where CityCat and the smaller CityFerry does a link that's simply impossible by road, or much, much longer, and in these cases the ferry wins on pure mobility grounds.
Of course, bus operators generally have backup fleets in case they need to suddenly replace a non-redundant train or ferry line that goes down. In Australia, there are often standing agreements between government and private operators to shift buses into this role, and given a day's warning — which Brisbane had — it's not hard to replace a failed network segment with buses even while running the rest of the bus network.
So is redundacy a good thing in disasters? Of course it is. Is it a reason to design networks that are redundant all the time, at the expense of more mobility that could be provided at the same cost? No, probably not, because you're weighing a rare disaster against daily inefficiency. Are there styles of network design that are both efficient and redundant? Yes, the high-frequency grid comes to mind.
In really big and dense cities, you can also get both redundancy and efficiency, because there will tend to be overlaps of service just to provide capacity into dense centers like Lower Manhattan, and in these cases, as Bob notes, redundancy is often possible. The key there, however, is that the duplication of services isn't justified by the need for redundancy, but rather for the sheer capacity need, and providing necessary capacity, of course, is part of efficiency.
As Brisbane's great flood of 2011 recedes, the Brisbane Times has this roundup of the flood's impact on public transit:
Premier Anna Bligh said travel on buses and trains would remain free for seven days, starting today.
CityCat and CityFerry services are out of action after the surging Brisbane River inflicted major damage to pontoons and terminals, but authorities have been trying to continue rail and bus services wherever possible.
If the river ferries are out for a while, it will be interesting to see how well buses take over their functions. As you can see on the ferry map below, or on Google Maps, Brisbane is defined by a squiggly river with a spectacular shortage of bridges. There are many bridges around the CBD but only three other bridges in the west and one in the east. The big CityCat ferries that ran the length of the river mostly served markets also served by buses running along the shore, but the smaller cross-river ferries made some connections that will be vastly longer by road (Bulimba to Teneriffe, for example, in the city's east).
Perhaps this will give some impetus to the idea of "green bridges" — bridges across the river exclusively for transit, bikes, pedestrians, and emergency vehicles. Brisbane already has one, in addition to two bike-ped bridges. Portland, a city much like Brisbane in many ways, is building it first.
From far-away Vancouver, Gordon Price shares his photos of some of what's been lost.
The great flood of 2011 has damaged many of Brisbane's riverside neighborhoods and destroyed the wharves of the CityCat river-ferry system. You can find plenty of images of the damage on the the websites of the Brisbane Times (Fairfax Media) and the Australian (Murdoch).
Here is footage (starting at 0:20) of the destruction of the floating section of the Riverwalk, which connected downtown to the dense New Farm district and carried thousands of pedestrians and cyclists per day. The huge piece of bridge was later intercepted by a heroic tugboat driver, who prevented it from crashing into the pylons of the Gateway Bridge. Many also have images of the Drift Cafe, a floating restaurant just a few meters from our office, breaking away and crashing into a bridge. And this jumped out from the Australian's coverage:
All buses to the city centre were cut off, trains continued to run but only sporadically, … Military demolition experts were dispatched to the Moggill ferry – still hanging on by one of the two ropes it uses to help ferry vehicles across the river – to determine whether the safest option was simply to sink it.
Commenter InBrisbane writes:
the river was full of logs, pontoons and luxury boats hurtling down like missiles. Not sure where any of the citycats are.
My understanding was that the CityCat ferries are safe, but that most of their wharves have been destroyed. UPDATE: Commenter Daryl Rosin advises that the ferries were moved out onto Moreton Bay, and berthed at Manly, where the river flooding won't affect them.
Image of Gardens Point CityCat wharf, Peter Wallis, Brisbane Courier-Mail.
The Brisbane River is expected to crest tomorrow at a level not seen for over a century. The state of Queensland has been enduring severe flooding for weeks, but only this week has the disaster arrived in the capital.
This ABC image from this afternoon is looking east toward downtown Brisbane, with the partly flooded Milton district in the foreground and Moreton Bay in the far distance.
Our firm's headquarters office is in the building under the orange arrow. We are on Park Road, which follows a little ridgeline surrounded by lower-lying land. So we are pretty fortunate, so far at least. Obviously, the power is out, and our offices are shut down as staff focus on protecting their homes and loved ones.
I am watching from afar in Canberra, following the ABC coverage. I'm thinking about my colleagues and clients, of course, but also about all the urban treasures of Brisbane that lie right along the river, including the major art museums, the State Library, the historic districts, the old botanic gardens, and many of the city's most vibrant and interesting inner-city neighborhoods.
As for transit, the wharves used by the popular river ferry network have been "smashed to pieces," according to the mayor. A heavily-used segment of floating walkway, which carried the riverside bike-ped path past the cliffs of New Farm, is gone. Still no word on the city's underground transit infrastructure.
Brisbane is often compared to Portland because in both cities, the urban renaissance began through a new engagement with the river. As a result, much of the revitalization and urban invention of the last decades has gone into riverside districts that are now in danger.
Loss of life in Brisbane is likely to be low, because unlike nearby Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, which saw devastating flash-floods yesterday, Brisbane has gotten some warning.
Still, for anyone who's admired Brisbane's romance with its river, this is heartbreaking.
One of my goals for this year is to connect this blog much more to my professional work as a transit planning and policy consultant. To that end, I've added a new page outlining my consulting services, aimed at cities worldwide but especially in North America, where I have the longest track record. If you like what you've read here, and you think your transit agency should talk to me, send them the link!
As a freelance consultant in North America, or as a Principal Consultant with MRCagney in Australia/New Zealand, I provide a range of advice and assistance to anyone who needs to think clearly about transit.
With the flexibility and low rates of a small firm, it’s very easy to engage me for even very small pieces of work, such as to be on call to advise on projects or provide expert review of a piece of work being done by your staff or another firm. I can also play an expert role in larger consulting teams.
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James Fallows of the Atlantic has been pushing back on the habit of journalists to resist all statements of objective fact:
In today's political environment, when so many simple facts are disputed, journalists can feel abashed about stating plainly what is true. With an anticipatory cringe about the angry letters they will receive or the hostile blog posts that will appear, they instead cover themselves by writing, "according to most scientists, the sun rises in the east, although critics say…."
How does this play out in transit journalism? Very, very often, journalists present a transit expert stating a fact and someone else expressing a desire, as though this were a "he said, she said" disagreement. For example, here's Mike Rosenberg of Bay Area News Group, about the routing of California High Speed Rail through the suburb of Burlingame just south of San Francisco.
Burlingame officials want their entire stretch of planned high-speed rail track buried underground … State rail planners say it would be several hundred million dollars cheaper to build aboveground tracks, which locals fear would tower 30 feet in the air, produce more noise and create a physical divide.
Note the tension of the two stem verbs. "Burlingame officials want" and "state planners say." It's set up to sound like "he said, she said."
But these two sentences don't describe a disagreement at all. Burlingame city officials are stating a desire, to have the line underground, to which state rail planners are responding with information about consequences, namely that undergrounding would be more expensive. That's not a disagreement; that's staff doing its job.
The disagreement is actually about who should pay for the undergounding that Burlingame wants. The state says that if a city wants high speed rail to go underground, it should pay the difference. The article quotes Burlingame mayor Terry Nagel's response:
Nagel said Burlingame could spend the city's entire $33 million annual budget on funding the tracks and barely make a dent in the price tag.
"It's not even a possibility," Nagel said Wednesday.
Note that mayor understands that building the line underground through his city will cost more than building the line on the surface. In fact, he's clear that it will cost massively more, more than his entire city budget. The cost is not in dispute. So why did we need "state planners say" in this sentence?
State rail planners say it would be several hundred million dollars cheaper to build aboveground tracks …
All other things being equal, underground construction is more expensive than surface. This is a fact about the universe, readily found in any transport engineering textbook, so it's misleading to describe it as a claim or allegation.
Even if the journalist were thinking like a divorce lawyer, for whom there may be no verifiable reality outside of the fevered imaginations of the two parties, he still could have said that "all parties agree that undergrounding costs much, much more than surface." The journalist knows this, because he has quoted the Mayor of Burlingame displaying a complete grasp of that fact, even though the fact is inconvenient for his side.
So let's read that whole passage again:
Burlingame officials want their entire stretch of planned high-speed rail track buried underground … State rail planners say it would be several hundred million dollars cheaper to build aboveground tracks, which locals fear would tower 30 feet in the air, produce more noise and create a physical divide.
Look again the three main verbs: want – say – fear. Emotion – alleged fact – emotion. And both emotions are on the same side! It's as predictable as the structure of a pop song. The people of Burlingame get their emotions recorded twice, while in opposition we hear only a fact about cost, presented as though it were the voice of some oppressor, crushing these honest folks who are trying to defend their homes.
Journalists! If you want to help people form coherent views that bear some relation to realty, ask yourself these questions:
[Burlingame expects] the rest of the state to essentially subsidize their property values. I cannot emphasize enough how absurd and out-of-touch that view is. At a time when property values have crashed hard in other parts of the state, why on earth would anyone in Riverside or Stockton or San Diego or East LA believe that Burlingame property owners deserve state aid to maintain their land values?
Bottom line: If your story sounds like passionate people are in conflict with soulless bean-counting bureaucrats, you probably don't understand your story yet. You may in fact have a story about venal, conniving bureaucrats, or about frightened or lazy bureaucrats blowing smoke, but the rules above will help you figure out if that's the case. You may also have a story about expert public servants doing their jobs, and if you want any honest and dedicated experts to be willing to work in those jobs, you owe it to them to consider that possibility.
I would welcome some push-back from professional journalists on this. (Email link is under my photo in the next column to the right.) Please forward a link to any journalists in your life! Me, I'm just a consumer of the product, and often not a very happy one.