Ryan Murphy is a lifelong resident of Brisbane, Australia, and he was
the youngest councillor ever elected to the City Council back in 2012.
And now, he's the Chair of the Brisbane City Council Transport Committee, which
Which plans for integrated public and active transport services across Brisbane,
and I'm excited that he's a guest on our Transit Unplugged podcast today.
I'm Paul Comfort, and I recently went to Australia for a 10 day visit and recorded
a number of podcasts and a couple of our TV shows, and this is the last of
four podcasts that came out of that.
Ryan and I met, uh, actually, uh, at the docks, uh, and the,
where the ferry system takes off.
They've got an amazing ferry system.
We recorded this podcast while on board several ferries and on
the docks there, uh, at Brisbane.
And, uh, he talks about the CityCat system and how they're growing ferry systems.
To become not just a way to get from A to B, but actually
be a destination on their own.
He also talks about their cross river rail project going underneath
the river that we visited.
And you can see on this month's episode of Transit Unplugged TV.
And he talks about the new Brisbane BRT system, Metro.
Which is these amazing buses that look like you're on a rail system.
We also showcase them on this month's episode two on YouTube.
So we have a television show, Transit Unplugged TV, that kind
of goes along with this podcast.
So the things he's talking about you can see if you go over to our
YouTube channel, Transit Unplugged TV.
This though is an amazing podcast interview.
With a bright leader for not only Australia, but I
would suggest for the world.
A global transport leader.
I think you'll really enjoy this conversation and feel his passion
for public transportation like mine, a fellow transit evangelist.
All on this episode of Transit Unplugged.
Excited to be in Brisbane on the Big River here with the chair of the City Council's
Transportation Committee, Ryan Murphy.
Ryan, thanks so much for hosting us today.
Good afternoon, Paul.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Tell us about where we're at right now.
We're riding inside one of your awesome tell us.
We're sitting on a CityCat, which is a catamaran.
It carries about 170 people, and they go up and down the Brisbane River to 22
stations and stops throughout our river.
And we carry about 5 million passengers a year on this system, and in Brisbane,
for a long time, I think it's been number 3 on TripAdvisor, in terms of the things
that people do when they come to the city.
Really?
Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of cities, their public transport doesn't really feature.
There is an attraction in it's own right, but I think people
really love the CityCats and Brisbane residents love them too.
Yeah, I was just in Halifax, and went on their ferries, and then also in,
my buddy Kevin Quinn runs TransLink in Vancouver, Canada, and they've got
them too, and the same kind of thing.
People just ride them just to ride them, but this is a fantastic, service, you
offer how many vehicles and all that kind of stuff and then fit it into
the context of your overall network.
Yeah, we've got about 22, CityCats.
We've got five KittyCats, too.
They're little, little cross river versions.
Oh, okay.
CityCats and KittyCats.
That's great, man.
Yeah, that's right.
A little bit of a Brisbane sense of humor.
We try to put in everything.
But, it provides effectively a 15 to 30 minute service, a 15 minutes
during the peak at 30 minutes off peak, up and down the river.
the peak lasts throughout the day though, so there's that
constant supply of, people.
And we know our busiest days on Saturday when, when Brisbane
residents like to get out and they don't need to be at work on time.
So, you know, they could take a little bit longer to get where they want to go.
And we know that the mix of, tourists and leisure users and commuters
is about 50 50 on this service.
So it does perform an important commuter function, but as I said, it's part
of the tourism offering in our city.
And you can go anywhere, all the way up river, it's about a 90 minute journey
from the start of the mouth of the river all the way up to the last stop.
So you can
What river is this?
It's the Brisbane River.
That's what I thought.
Yeah.
Brisbane River.
Yeah.
I don't mention the name because it's the name of the city, but
yeah, we're on the Brisbane River.
You know, this is unique.
People in America don't think, realize this is really a river city and like, it
like runs its way through the city and like the whole city is built around it.
Yeah, the whole city is built around the river And so bridges are really important
in Brisbane for getting around and they're big bottlenecks in our transport system,
so the river is a great way to avoid those windy roads that snake through
Brisbane and just get out there and see.
And it used to be a port city, there was a lot of maritime, agricultural traffic
that would come up here and load hay and copper and minerals and then as that's
all moved to dedicated port facilities at the mouth of the river, Brisbane
residents all of a sudden felt comfortable to live on the river in the 50s and 60s
and, it was about 1996 that the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, then Jim Soorley,
decided to, start the CityCat system.
A limited number of terminals, a limited number of services and we're now in
our fourth generation of vessels.
We've got a double decker.
They keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more accessible, so, you know,
we've got quite a big fleet now and, operated by River City Ferries which
is, Sealink and so they're a listed company in Australia, they run maritime
services, all around the country for us.
I was just Just with Howard Collins, my friend down from Sydney, we were on
Tasmania and he was there inspecting seven new ferries that they're getting built
in Tasmania that they'll bring back to Sydney and run on their ferry service.
So, a lot of water, obviously, around the island and a lot of great ferry services.
Tell us about, Ryan, the overall transportation network in Brisbane.
Walk us through some of what you've got here.
Brisbane's a city really, built on the back of the bus.
It's a city that, the city council runs its own transport company.
Next year, 2025, will be our 100th year in operation, and we own, and operate,
all, the vast majority of the city's, public transport fleet, whether that's
buses or CityCats, A lot of other cities, like Sydney and Melbourne, very much,
cities built on the back of rail, and rail does the heavy lifting, but in Brisbane,
we've got 27 kilometers of busways, and buses, do the heavy lifting, so.
Dedicated busways.
Yeah, dedicated busways.
I saw them today.
Yeah.
Some are even grade separated, actually.
It's everything it looks like.
It's great.
Yeah.
Really high quality infrastructure.
and, it means we're a lot more similar to a city like, you know, Curitiba or Rio.
so a lot of Australians don't really understand that, that there are
bus rapid transit cities out there because they don't visit the places
where they are, but they are there.
You just have to look hard enough to find
them.
Yeah.
So you've got a lot of buses that you run yourself.
Yep.
And then what else?
So the bus now it's about 80 million a year.
We have a city rail network which is quite expansive but only about a third
of the patronage of the bus network.
And historically the Council and the State Government built these
networks in parallel to each other.
So there's not been that really great multi modal opportunity that you get
in some cities between bus and rail.
We're in the process of fixing that now.
We signed a landmark agreement with the State Government earlier this year
to fix our bus to rail connections and really integrate all the modes
ahead of the Olympics in 2032.
So there's some big reforms happening in the city over the next few years.
Well Councilman, we were, we jumped off one ferry and we got on a new one.
Tell me about this new one.
this is the, the next generation, generation 4 CityCat, so, this,
I think there's about 6 or 7 of these in service at the moment.
they are our latest offering.
They feature these wide panoramic windows, space for people in wheelchairs,
previously couldn't see out the windows because the windows were too high.
Okay.
But now they've got the best seat in the house right here.
you've got USB charging throughout, better, more comfortable
seating and, wider, spaces.
We even put a bar in this one as well.
Oh, nice.
So we hire them out for functions and parties oh yeah.
Occasionally.
and it's got a, a double deck as well, so you can go up on the top
and there's a, a, a sun shade.
'cause we are unfortunately, get quite a lot of, UV light up here in Queensland.
so you can sit up there on the top deck and watch the river go
by and the wind in your hair.
It's a really great.
way to spend the weekend.
We'll get right back to my interview with Ryan Murphy, but
first I have a favor to ask of you.
Please take a moment to participate in our listener survey.
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So just go to transitunplugged.
com forward slash survey to fill it out online.
The link will also be in this podcast's show notes.
Thank you for your help.
I really appreciate it.
All right, let's jump back into the conversation on buses.
You were telling me about that the bus network is the backbone of what
you've got going on here, but today I visited one of your amazing operations,
which you piloted, I think, for a month and soon when you get the
whole fleet in, you'll jump back in.
It's a BRT like service, but it's a Metro, and I'm telling you, Ryan, the vehicles
are some of the coolest things I've seen.
Yeah, it's a really cool vehicle, and what it is is part of Brisbane Metro, which
is It's a bus rapid transit project, to replace, several of our congested lines,
the triple one, the sixty six, with, a large double articulated electric bus.
So, this is the Hess Light Tram 25, it's in service in a number of cities in
France and Switzerland, but we've taken that bus that was existing, we've brought
it into Australian design rules, we've upgraded it, we've put, six residential
homes worth of air conditioners on the top because they don't need them
a lot in, France and Switzerland.
And we brought it here, to enable it to improve the capacity of our busway system.
And, what we do is we, we basically, the concept is we take the existing bus routes
that have buses that can carry about 76 people on them, we replace them with, a
bus that can carry 170 people, and then we also, truncate large parts of our
network where the bus would previously run half or a quarter full all the way into
the CBD, we then truncate that at busway stations to bring that resource back
into the network So, it's about Brisbane doing what other bigger cities have done,
getting used to the two seat journeys.
That's what Brisbane Metro is about in our city and we also deal with a big problem
that we have in the core of our city, which is bus congestion and we take about
a third of those buses clogging up the CBD and redirect them into the suburbs, so it
solves a number of busway problems that we
have.
I saw that today actually.
I saw bus after bus after bus this morning.
I was at Anzac Square and I was having coffee and I, when I used to run
Baltimore, I saw the same problem.
I'd have, you know, 11 buses go by in one minute and it was congested
and so that, I get what you're doing.
You're going, this is the feeder into the main network.
Yeah, I mean a lot of, a lot of cities do that.
I think it's a bit of a choice between, you know, what type of
light rail are they going to have.
Yeah.
In Brisbane, we did look at converting the busway to light rail, but we have such a
big out of catchment, that we would have to all terminate, I wouldn't be able to
use the busway at all, so there'd be so many thousands of introduced transfers.
This, this product sort of sits between, buses at the high level
and then trams at the low level.
It's a, it's a tram or a light rail light capacity.
Improvement, but without anywhere near the cost.
So if you think about something like, your iPhone has wireless charging, well
this is like a tram without the wires.
So we're effectively going back to the tram system that Brisbane had,
back in the, in the, in the forties.
and we're starting again with the, the latest and greatest wireless technology.
So these vehicles all use flash charging from panto graphs and, we
charge 'em at the end of every trip.
So they'll, they'll finish their route metro one or two, and they'll
flash charge for just six minutes.
Battery's fully topped up, and then off they'll go.
And you hope to open this service in your 100th anniversary year of 2025.
Is that right?
Yeah, we do.
It's it's exciting.
we, we've had a lot of interest from all around the world, about what we're
doing here to, to really take that bus rapid transit product forwards.
And, a lot of cities, you know, in, in particularly, you know, Vancouver has
been reaching out to us, Auckland, you know, big cities with, busways, but they
want to know how to get the next level of performance out of their busway.
Yeah.
And, we think this This product sits at a great point in between that full
conversion to light rail and just running buses at a rapid frequency
because you get both capacity and you get a really high quality passenger
offering and people are seeking that out more and more in public transport.
It's not just about where it goes, it's about whether you get there
in style and comfort and whether there's those amenities for you.
It feels and looks like you're on a brand new light rail vehicle on the inside.
It's got that vibe.
Speaking of rail Let's talk about rail.
Brisbane is the capital of Queensland, right?
You're That's right.
Yes.
And so, the State's heavily involved in the rail service here, is that right?
Yeah, the state government runs the, the rail network, Queensland Rail, City
Rail, it goes by those sort of names, it's, it's actually a, a reasonably
good network across Brisbane, has great coverage, around the historical rail
lines, the issue has always been the, you know, the cost to serve and, and,
the patronage has never been particularly impressive to warrant further investment.
The city's going through a very significant investment in rail at
the moment with Cross River Rail, which is the second crossing of the
Brisbane River of the rail network.
So it links the Gold Coast line, Beanlea line, with a new line that runs under the
river and creates some new underground stations in the heart of Brisbane City.
That's wrapping up at the moment, I don't think it'll commission probably
until 2026, but that'll add a lot more capacity into the railway.
network as well so we can ramp up that frequency and capacity
ahead of the Olympics in 2032.
Yeah, let's talk a little about that.
Tell us about the plans the city has and a little bit about the Olympics coming.
So we just did a show in LA.
Of course, they're the next one and then you're the one right after that.
Yeah, Paris, LA and then Brisbane.
City, city no
one's ever heard of.
They will after this.
Well, we, we, we.
We are so humbled and so honoured to be standing, you know, with Paris
and LA in those Olympic cities and we understand the task in front of
us to retrofit this city's, the small city's public transport system to a
system that has to host summer games.
I mean, that is a momentous undertaking and it really fills me with both,
you know, hope of what we can change and what we can do in the
next few years and also dread of, you know, what if we get it wrong?
We've put in place a range of initiatives, the Lord Mayor a few months ago
released a document called the Race to Gold, and it's all about these
transformative improvements we can make to our city's public transport network
in the eight year run up to the Games.
And we're very much looking to bus rapid transit as one of those things that
we know we can do that in eight years.
If we want to launch a light rail project in Australia today, it's eight years just
to get the permitting done basically, so you know, it's similar in America.
Of But bus rapid transit can give us some of those lighter touch solutions,
things like transitways and bus priority with these metro vehicles that we've
got now and we can deliver these step change improvements in capacity to
parts of the city where we, we know we actually need to increase the amount
of seats we have on public transport by 50 percent to meet the games demand.
So if you go to any city in the world and say, I need you to increase the public
transport system by 50%, most planners would tell you, you're crazy, right?
It's going to enable some really bold decision making.
We need to make decisions that might have been very difficult
with the politics of today.
There's an Olympics urgency and Brisbane residents really don't want to see the
city let itself down on the world stage.
So we're going to use that, we're going to harness that over the next few years.
Tell me some about your background and history and how you got
so interested and involved in transportation and in government.
I've been in this role for coming up on five years.
And, prior to this I was in public relations for major infrastructure
and resource projects in Queensland.
things that people generally don't like in their backyard, like, copper mines
and, dams and, pipelines and things like that, so, I, I guess I got used
to having difficult conversations about things that, that are necessary for
the economy but, that people might not necessarily like in their backyard.
Now I get to do something that is, so exciting because I'm
serving as a civil servant.
CityCouncil.
I've been at Council for 12 years now.
Oh wow.
I love serving my community, but the transport role gives me the opportunity
to help our city kind of grow up and fix the problems that I experienced as a user,
as a consumer of our city's transport.
I don't like that, why can't I see a screen on this CityCat at
the moment telling me what my next destination is and how long it's
going to take me to get there.
These are the customer facing elements that so many transport systems are
getting right around the world.
I want to bring that here so that we can also get that right and we've got so
many great companies that are looking to make Brisbane home, looking to set up a
presence in the city since we were awarded the Games, that I actually think this
is not going to be as hard as it looks.
It just takes will.
That's wonderful.
Let's talk about the nation of Australia.
Where does public transportation sit in the list of priorities for this country
and where do you think it's going?
I don't think transport has been a particular priority for Australian
politicians until recently.
I think successes like the Sydney Metro really, I think, shown politicians of
both sides in Australia the potential for these game changing projects to
actually make a lasting difference I mean, the amount of money that we
spend in this country, particularly on highway and road transport, is
astronomical compared to what we would spend on urban public transport.
and, there are real benefits to ESG and the sustainability of cities that
you can drive when you get public transport systems functioning well.
I always make the argument, around the need for public transport,
around the avoided cost of road widening and road infrastructure.
I mean, you look at L.
A. You know, they try to build their way out of traffic congestion by adding
more lanes and it's, it's not worked.
But you improve the public transport product, you can
avoid billions in road work.
So if you try and make that, I think, financial argument, because Australians
are very practical in that way, all of a sudden you start to see people go,
Oh, actually, maybe we should have an additional bus, or maybe the span of
hours should be a little bit longer.
but you have to reach that threshold of quality that people will, will use it.
And, you know, I think we're very close.
That's great.
Ryan we wish you the very best as you continue to help lead this
city's transportation future.
No, thanks for doing what you're doing, Paul.
It's very important and very much appreciated for all of us
out there that are trying to make a difference in this field.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Transit Unplugged
with our special guest, Ryan Murphy.
Hi, I'm Tris Hussey, editor of the podcast, and coming up next week on
the show, we have Tom Drozt CEO of Ben Franklin Transit in Washington State.
As Paul mentioned in the episode, we'd really appreciate your
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