The Brisbane Metro officially opened on the 1st of July (after these buses had been operating on other routes) and transit nerds and anoraks have been freaking out about it as though it was the public transit spawn of Satan.
It is not.
It is a high-frequency bus rapid transit system that if played out properly, will eventually expand to become a network.
I do not understand the transit nerds' and anoraks' meltdown over this. The buses themselves are 3-section bi-articulated buses; with dual engine sections as push/pull. Granted that this is being marketed as buses cosplaying as something bigger but given that this is cheaper to implement, that there are 60 units operating on the M1 and M2 routes, I would have thought that this would have been good enough.
I like the bendy-buses that Sydney Buses/Gladys'-Private-Kids runs, and have travelled on many E, X and L buses right up and down the North Shore and Northern Beaches. I like the Double Deck B1 buses that run up the Northern Beaches and I am sad that apart from B1, 607X and 611X, there seems to be little desire to run more. Partly this is due to the technical constraints of running very tall buses under things like low bridges but mostly this has to do with a lack in investment in hardware. This is exactly what you should expect from vampire capital companies like Keolis Downer and Transit Systems.
One of the unique technical problems that the Brisbane metropolitan area has is that it is really a series of connected swamps with pockets of harder land that they've built a city on top of. I imagine that unlike Sydney which is mostly sandstone, or other cities like London which is clay, that Brisbane's swampy and boggy terrain would make building massive amounts of underground railway difficult. The line to Brisbane Airport for instance, is built atop pillars and kind of exists on top of viaducts. Admittedly Queensland uses 3'6" narrow gauge as opposed to 4'8½" standard gauge, which does mean that trains are narrower but that still doesn't change the ground over which the infrastructure runs.
Maybe it's just the marketing which offends the nerds and anoraks, or maybe it's something deeper? I have no idea if there is a kind of turf war between the gunzels and the bunzels, or even if in Sydney we have funzels, but I imagine that if there is, then it's like a Jets and Sharks type thing from West Side Story. Maybe the gunzels need to stand around getting angry at things, while they stand around in their anoraks or else they freeze to death... even in Brisbane where if the temperature drops below 25°C, the gunzels and bunzels need to throw on an extra coat.
In theory, I can see no reason why I shouldn't like double-bendy-buses. The mere fact that they've stuck a name (Metro) which exists in other cities as the branding for high frequency single deck robot trains is irrelevant. A rose by any other name does smell as sweet. There really is no reason why a metropolitan bus line that runs into the suburbs of the metropolis shouldn't be called a "Metro".
And here's the really ironic thing. Before the Sydney Metro there was the Sydney Metrobus. Again, before Gladys decided to sell all of the buses to her criminal mates (and she was never charged with corruption even in the face of the ICAC ruling), there were many Metrobus lines in Sydney, operating to a 7 minute frequency in some cases.
Maybe it's just the hard core gunzels but I do not understand what is so bad about giving people more options to get around. As someone who could in theory be a bunzel, gunzel, funzel, and munzel all in the same trip to work, I like having loads of intermodal connections. I hope they expand the Brisbane Metro and have it go to lots more places like the airport, the Ekka, and lots more besides. Good luck to it.
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