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Old 07-22-2013, 05:39 PM
 
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While living in Europe, not only in the big cities but the small ones as well, you can live there and get around without owning a car. Go to work, go on dates, whatever. No car required. Of course in the US it's virtually impossible. So where does Australia fall on this? Not just Sydney and Melbourne but other cities such as Brisbane, Canberra, Gold Coast, is it possible to live without a car and just use public transportation? What is the quality of public transportation in Australia?
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Old 07-22-2013, 06:05 PM
 
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Its a mixed bag in Brisbane.

Personally I find the trains pretty good, takes 22 minutes to travel about 25Kms to the outskirts of the CBD as its a express train that skips stations. Its rare to be any more than 2 or 3 minutes late getting home or to work. Would say however its not exactly cheap, costs me around $11 a day the cost of not wanting a shack on stilts in the inner city.

Other areas have packed trains and stopping all stations it can take a lot longer per KM.

Inner city buses I believe are less flash, at least I have a work mate that has a rant about every 3rd morning :P. So yes Brisbane public transport very doable.

Should add, live without a car? well we could walk to the supermarket and id have to bus to the train station, yea hell no!

Last edited by Battleneter; 07-22-2013 at 06:14 PM..
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Old 07-22-2013, 06:23 PM
 
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Originally Posted by Battleneter View Post

Should add, live without a car? well we could walk to the supermarket and id have to bus to the train station, yea hell no!
Well I wasn't saying it was preferable, just whether or not it was possible as it is in Britain and the rest of Europe.
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Old 07-22-2013, 06:37 PM
 
Location: Brisbane
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I did live in Brisbane for 5-6 years without a car, so it is certainly doable. I used to work in Brisbane city, catch the trains to the Gold and Sunshine Coasts etc when i wanted to get away, and took a Greyhound Bus to my parents home town when I went.

In Cairns the first time we went, we did managed to explore pretty much all the touristy things in the city area using the public buses and walking.
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Old 07-23-2013, 04:24 AM
 
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From my experience living there, Canberra's public transport is limited to buses (no trains, light rail or trams) that are pretty much set up to take people direct from the suburbs to work in the major employment hubs, and back home.

Home - ACTION Buses

Because the city is both sprawling and financially well off, its just not geared towards 24/7 or even 12/7 public transport, and travel by taxi pretty expensive. How big an issue that is would probably depend on how active and diverse your social life is.
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Old 07-24-2013, 09:33 AM
 
Location: Perth, Western Australia
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Public transport is good here for getting into and out of the city, not great for getting from suburb to suburb though generally speaking. Definitely possible to live without a car, though it becomes more of hassle the further you live from the centre of the city or a major transport stop like a train station, or road with high frequency bus routes.
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Old 07-24-2013, 06:53 PM
 
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Originally Posted by Richard1098 View Post
From my experience living there, Canberra's public transport is limited to buses (no trains, light rail or trams) that are pretty much set up to take people direct from the suburbs to work in the major employment hubs, and back home.

Home - ACTION Buses

Because the city is both sprawling and financially well off, its just not geared towards 24/7 or even 12/7 public transport, and travel by taxi pretty expensive. How big an issue that is would probably depend on how active and diverse your social life is.
Canberra is probably the worst city for urban sprawl in Australia. It seems as though there's a national park separating every suburb or that they laid the plans for a city of 3 million and only 300 thousand turned up.
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Old 07-26-2013, 06:08 AM
 
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Yes if you're going to the city, or major sub-regional centres, but still not really convenient for getting to somewhere deep in the suburbs and from suburb to suburb. Our transport systems tend to be radial - all bringing people to and from the city centre. So yes, doable, but you just have to plan your journeys if you're going somewhere away from transport infrastructure.
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Old 07-28-2013, 10:50 AM
 
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I think Melbourne is the only place that really has its act together as far as these things go. I think Sydney winds up with a large network by its sheer size but from my limited experience it seems like it can take an unreasonably long time to go a relatively short distance. I've heard it said that much of the problems in Sydney and Brisbane come from them being unplanned, penal colonies where cities like Melbourne and Adelaide were planned from the start and never had the problems of trying to figure out how to widen country lanes into arterials.

Too many Brisbanites I talk to seem to attribute the relative ease of living without a car to the efficacy of the transit system. Who the heck wants to wait for a bus when all you need is a gallon of milk? Transportation of any sort is just a poor substitute for access. Philadelphia had a decent transit system but I rarely used it because I didn't need to. I biked most places I needed to go in 5 minutes or less. Some trips could take up to 10 minutes.

I live ~5km from the Brisbane CBD and don't own a car. It's a lot more challenging than my neighborhood back in Philly. It's tolerable because there's a grocery store a 5 minute walk away and there are enough shops to cover the basic conveniences (chemist, cafe, sushi shop, BWS, pizza, etc) but it's not particularly pleasant to walk around here and the drivers are insanely aggressive (also part of the reason I'm not too keen on cycling around here) . . . and there's really nowhere else to walk to. It's too far to walk to another neighborhood that's actually quasi-urban and walkable.

Those urban/walkable neighborhoods are really limited to perhaps a 3km ring around the CBD and would include New Farm, South Brisbane, Petrie Terrace, Spring Hill and parts of West End and Woolloongabba. Unfortunately most of that area is also insanely expensive. I'd say that Stones Corner would really be the best of both worlds - if only it had a proper grocery store.

I don't live that close to a train station so I don't use the trains very often but the busway is certainly nice. My only real complaints are how expensive it is and that after 10pm it can be an adventure trying to figure out how to get home.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Docman View Post
While living in Europe, not only in the big cities but the small ones as well, you can live there and get around without owning a car. Go to work, go on dates, whatever. No car required. Of course in the US it's virtually impossible.
This isn't remotely true.

In Philadelphia 35% of households don't own a car. I lived there for 12 years without much need for a car. 1/3 of people living within a mile of City Hall walk to work. Bicycle mode share is over 5% and the transit system carries 1.25 million trips per day.

US cities by % of households without no cars. Compare these numbers to Melbourne (where you're likely to have the lowest rates of car ownership - City of Melbourne at 40.1%, City of Yarra at 21.3%, City of Port Phillip at 18.4%. Brisbane it's 8% and in West End (which is just a post code within Brisbane) it's 20%.

New York – 55.7%
Washington, DC – 36.93%
Baltimore – 35.89%
Philadelphia – 35.73%
Boston – 34.91%
Buffalo – 31.42%
Pittsburgh – 29.44%
Chicago – 28.85%
San Francisco – 28.56%
New Orleans – 27.32%
Miami – 26.71%
Atlanta – 23.58%
Cincinnati – 23.37%
Milwaukee – 21.36%
Louisville – 20.47%
Minneapolis – 19.70%
Oakland – 19.62%
Honolulu – 19.36%
St. Paul – 16.83%
Los Angeles – 16.53%
Seattle – 16.32%

It's tough to do direct, statistical comparisons between Australian and US cities. Melbourne and Sydney are essentially a bunch of little independent boroughs where census data is collected separately. The only major US city that is similar in that regard is Boston. Boston proper is tiny. As a tourist you would never know that you got off the subway in Cambridge or Dorchester unless someone told you. Brisbane, for contrast, is geographically enormous. Even after subtracting for Moreton Island, Brisbane is over 3x the size of Philadelphia with around 500,000 fewer people. Brisbane is 15% larger than NYC with ~1/8 the population. You have to parse the data carefully but I think regardless of whether you look at it from the metro, city, or neighborhood level most US cities compare favorably to Australian cities of a similar stature.
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Old 07-28-2013, 05:57 PM
 
Location: Brisbane
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Quote:
Originally Posted by drive carephilly View Post
I think Melbourne is the only place that really has its act together as far as these things go. I think Sydney winds up with a large network by its sheer size but from my limited experience it seems like it can take an unreasonably long time to go a relatively short distance. I've heard it said that much of the problems in Sydney and Brisbane come from them being unplanned, penal colonies where cities like Melbourne and Adelaide were planned from the start and never had the problems of trying to figure out how to widen country lanes into arterials.

Too many Brisbanites I talk to seem to attribute the relative ease of living without a car to the efficacy of the transit system. Who the heck wants to wait for a bus when all you need is a gallon of milk? Transportation of any sort is just a poor substitute for access. Philadelphia had a decent transit system but I rarely used it because I didn't need to. I biked most places I needed to go in 5 minutes or less. Some trips could take up to 10 minutes.

I live ~5km from the Brisbane CBD and don't own a car. It's a lot more challenging than my neighborhood back in Philly. It's tolerable because there's a grocery store a 5 minute walk away and there are enough shops to cover the basic conveniences (chemist, cafe, sushi shop, BWS, pizza, etc) but it's not particularly pleasant to walk around here and the drivers are insanely aggressive (also part of the reason I'm not too keen on cycling around here) . . . and there's really nowhere else to walk to. It's too far to walk to another neighborhood that's actually quasi-urban and walkable.

Those urban/walkable neighborhoods are really limited to perhaps a 3km ring around the CBD and would include New Farm, South Brisbane, Petrie Terrace, Spring Hill and parts of West End and Woolloongabba. Unfortunately most of that area is also insanely expensive. I'd say that Stones Corner would really be the best of both worlds - if only it had a proper grocery store.

I don't live that close to a train station so I don't use the trains very often but the busway is certainly nice. My only real complaints are how expensive it is and that after 10pm it can be an adventure trying to figure out how to get home.




This isn't remotely true.

In Philadelphia 35% of households don't own a car. I lived there for 12 years without much need for a car. 1/3 of people living within a mile of City Hall walk to work. Bicycle mode share is over 5% and the transit system carries 1.25 million trips per day.

US cities by % of households without no cars. Compare these numbers to Melbourne (where you're likely to have the lowest rates of car ownership - City of Melbourne at 40.1%, City of Yarra at 21.3%, City of Port Phillip at 18.4%. Brisbane it's 8% and in West End (which is just a post code within Brisbane) it's 20%.

New York – 55.7%
Washington, DC – 36.93%
Baltimore – 35.89%
Philadelphia – 35.73%
Boston – 34.91%
Buffalo – 31.42%
Pittsburgh – 29.44%
Chicago – 28.85%
San Francisco – 28.56%
New Orleans – 27.32%
Miami – 26.71%
Atlanta – 23.58%
Cincinnati – 23.37%
Milwaukee – 21.36%
Louisville – 20.47%
Minneapolis – 19.70%
Oakland – 19.62%
Honolulu – 19.36%
St. Paul – 16.83%
Los Angeles – 16.53%
Seattle – 16.32%

It's tough to do direct, statistical comparisons between Australian and US cities. Melbourne and Sydney are essentially a bunch of little independent boroughs where census data is collected separately. The only major US city that is similar in that regard is Boston. Boston proper is tiny. As a tourist you would never know that you got off the subway in Cambridge or Dorchester unless someone told you. Brisbane, for contrast, is geographically enormous. Even after subtracting for Moreton Island, Brisbane is over 3x the size of Philadelphia with around 500,000 fewer people. Brisbane is 15% larger than NYC with ~1/8 the population. You have to parse the data carefully but I think regardless of whether you look at it from the metro, city, or neighborhood level most US cities compare favorably to Australian cities of a similar stature.
That is for the Metro area of course (Though Brisbane City is not that much different at 9.5% people without a car), Sydney is the least car dependent Metro in Australia by quite a margin. At 9.3% of households without a car Adelaide is actually the second least car dependent metro in Australia, something i find quite surprising.

Another few more interesting things from the census is that someone in Metro Brisbane is actually more likely to walk to work than someone in Metro Melbourne (3.1% of total in Brisbane to 2.2% in Melbourne) and is also slightly less likely to be in a car 64.5% in Brisbane compared to 65% in Melbourne.

The Aldi in Stones Corner does Sucks badly (I have been Once, which was once to many), we live about 300m from the Greenslopes Mall, at least it has a half decent supermarket in it.

Last edited by danielsa1775; 07-28-2013 at 07:26 PM..
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