Southern Cross Citylink

[ged]

Southern Cross City link service between Ipswich and Indooroopilly via Mt Crosby etc finishes today 26th June...lack of government funding given as the reason.

[daveeyh]

Don't know about the patronage at the Ipswich end but I can only ever seeing one person board the service at Indooroopilly - I couldn't see TransLink fudning a service with that level of patronage.

[triplethree]

I rode the Southern Cross Citylink route from Ipswich to Indooroopilly one morning, in December 2008 IIRC. It was the first service of the morning (I can't be bothered rummaging through my TT collection right now to find the correct time, I think it left Ipswich Transit Centre about 7:30am). There was only one passenger besides me (a blue-collar shiftworker who got on at Ipswich and got off at Karalee). I was surprised there were no commuters or Indro shoppers catching the service.

While at Ipswich, the driver received a message on the radio to wait for the other passenger, who had called the depot on his mobile from a late-running train, which I thought was a nice old-style touch. The driver practically begged me to sign a petition asking the government to fund the service and handed me some literature to take home.

I agree that it's probably not economically feasible for Citylink to be funded by the state, which raises the question - why are the 282, 399, 540 and other peri-urban routes included in the TL network?

[Borco]

I'm not sure about the 399, but the 282 picks up a lot of people from Redland Bay and Mt Cotton going to Logan Hyperdome, the housing in that area is increasing big time, even though on a map it doesn't appear to be that way, there's also an industrial/commerical park being built along the 282 route right now. While the 540 covers a fairly densely populated area between Park Ridge and the City. This isn' the case in Karalee and Karwana Downs where the population is fairly stagnated and not growing, and I think there would be more people heading to Ipswich than to Indooroopilly, being the nearest major centre for them.

[PRT 065]

The 540 route generaly has about 30 people per bus on at a time . between Grand Plaza and the city the route is not used much during off peak. But on school holidaysm the service runs full most days to grand plaza and often requires a second backup bus incase of more passengers.
For the area between Jimbomba and Beaudesert only about 10 people go through there so that area would not be viable.