The flood has wrecked a number of Brisbane’s CityCat ferry terminals, including the one below at Toowong, and it may take the Council 18 months to rebuild them (CityCat terminals could take a year and a half to rebuild).
Given the massive cost of fixing up roads and other infrastructure across Brisbane, the City Council should reconsider the viability of some CityCat services and terminals. The CityCat is popular on weekends, with tourists and locals crowding the catamarans for the trip to Southbank, but it is not a popular choice for commuters during the working week.
An article in the Courier-Mail last November highlighted the declining commuter demand for CityCat services (Commuters abandon CityCats):
COMMUTERS are abandoning Brisbane’s CityCats and ferries in droves, with 2350 fewer trips recorded on the river each day compared to last year.
Despite a boom in public transport usage which has seen almost 50 million trips across the network in just three months, patronage on the city’s ferries fell to just 1.54 million in the September quarter.
That is 212,000 trips fewer than the same quarter last year, in the busiest time of the year for public transport usage.
The Regatta terminal at Toowong, in particular, did not appear to be very well utilised, probably because Toowong has both bus and train services. Hence the Council could rank fixing up the Regatta terminal as a low priority compared with more pressing needs across Brisbane.
Furthermore, public transport is expensive to provide, and it may be worthwhile for the Council to rationalize CityCat services more broadly. It could reduce CityCat services for commuters and reallocate recurrent funding to new bus services, leaving a limited weekday CityCat service mainly aimed at tourists, while maintaining the popular weekend services.
Queensland Economy Watch 