Brisbane Tunnels - Inner Northern Busway Open Day Pictures

I went to the open day at the Inner Northern Busway today, where people could walk through the tunnel that connects the new King George Square busway station to Roma Street station and beyond. Several thousand people were there when I was there - I got to King George Square in time for the 10am opening, and left Roma Street transit centre at about 11.15am.



The busway is a great idea. It means that the CityTrain network, the South-East Busway and the Inner Northern busway are now linked up to each other. You can get off a train at Roma Street and connect via bus to the Queen Street station under the Myer Centre, or you can do the reverse. This means that no longer will you have to walk up the hill that separates Central Station from Adelaide and Queen Streets (the main shopping streets in Brisbane). Buses from the south-east and the north can now duck underneath the ridiculous traffic in the city centre, which means they might start being on time more often.



And an even better idea is the King George Square Cycle Centre,which is underneath the Ann Street entrance of the station. There are hundreds of bike racks, ten or fif teen showers (in each of the male and female shower rooms), and a dedicated entrance on Roma Street, just under the Turbot Street bridge (click here for a Google Map). You'll be able to ride your bike right up to the door, have a shower, leave it in a rack, and catch a connecting bus to work - or walk out straight onto Adelaide or Ann streets and walk to work.



There was plenty of free stuff to grab today. There were showbags being given out - the bags were orange coloured, and the same sort of material that supermarkets sell as 'green bags' these days. I also got a cotton hat (not bad quality), some free fairy floss, a drink bottle, a cardboard bus to make and put on my mantlepiece, some excellent, detailed, free maps of Brisbane, and a free Go Card. There was no money on the card, unfortunately, but it will be good to have one that I don't have to pay $15 for.



I won't use the Go Card much - I did the sums when it was announced and I realised that it was much better value to have a weekly paper ticket (seven days unlimited travel for the price of four daily tickets) than to use the Go Card's half-price option after six trips in a Monday to Sunday period. The Go Card breaks even with that deal if you take ten trips a week, so if you travel to and from work and then use the weekly ticket even once on the weekend, you are ahead. And with the weekly ticket you have the security of knowing that you can use if for no extra cost if you need to make an unexpected journey.



The photos in this article are some of the ones I took today. If you'd like to see more, click here to go to the set at Zooomr where you can see about sixty photos from today.

Or if you want a souvenir of today's open day, you can buy a 20-page photobook from Brisbane Books - click here to see more.

There's already a few photos from other Brisbanites up on the internet, including flickr users smurfie_77, stephenk1977, David de Groot, and allan_nielsen