The best and worst Brisbane suburbs for public transport

Key findings

• Fastest in: Bowen Hills (9 min), Fortitude Valley (14 min), Milton (14 min), Newmarket (15 min), South Brisbane (15 min). Slowest that still works: Larapinta (123 min), Wights Mountain (113 min), Anstead (107 min).
• Public transport is more competitive than it feels. Counting peak traffic and parking, transit is within 10 minutes of driving in 152 of 199 suburbs, and beats the car outright in 72: Chelmer, Northgate, Zillmere, Taringa, Corinda, Strathpine, Graceville, Sherwood and more.
• The number is door-to-door, and it shows its working. The median commute is 46 minutes, of which about 11 is walking to and from stops. Every figure breaks down as walk + wait + ride, so the ride matches the trip you know.
• Connectivity is a different story to speed. The typical suburb reaches 6 routes with 58 departures an hour at peak. Only 31% have a train within a 10-minute walk, 58% have buses only, and just 5 (Brisbane City, Spring Hill, Milton, South Brisbane, Newstead) reach train, bus and ferry.

How this was calculated

Every number here is reproducible. This is exactly how each one was produced, and where it can be off.

• The suburbs. Every gazetted suburb (ABS Suburbs & Localities, 2021) whose centre is within 20km of Brisbane Central station: 205 in all.
• Where we measure from. Not the geometric middle of the suburb (which often lands in a park, barracks or industrial estate and makes transport look worse than it is), but the population-weighted centroid (WorldPop 2020, 1km): the centre weighted toward where people actually live, using the WorldPop 1km population grid. The exact point is published for every suburb via the 📍 link, so you can check it.
• The commute. Planned door-to-door from that point to Brisbane Central station, arriving by 9:00am on a Tuesday 18 August 2026, using Google Directions on the public TransLink timetable and taking the fastest option offered. Each figure splits into walk + wait + ride: the ride is in-vehicle time (this is the part that matches the trip you know), the walk is getting to and from stops, the wait is time at the stop. The evening figure is a 6:00pm trip home.
• The car. The same origin to the CBD by car in the morning peak, using Google's live-typical traffic (duration-in-traffic, not the free-flow time), plus a 8-minute allowance for finding a park and walking to the office, so the car is door-to-door too and the comparison is fair.
• Connectivity and frequency. The distinct routes you can catch, the weekday departures, and the peak departures per hour within an 800m walk of the origin, across bus, train and ferry, counted from the TransLink timetable.
• Checks. The dataset does not publish unless every value passes a plausibility gate (nothing slower than walking, no inner suburb over an hour), and the results are validated against real commuter times.

Where it can be off (honestly)

• It measures from the middle of where people live, so if you live next to the station your own commute will beat the number here; the ride time in the breakdown is the part to compare.
• It is one representative weekday, so times shift a little with the timetable, and a handful of suburbs still show a short bus ride to their nearest station because that is genuinely the fastest option from the population centre.
• Connectivity uses a straight-line 800m radius, so a stop across a river or rail line can look closer than it walks. Park & ride is not modelled yet.
• It is the network as timetabled today, not a forecast: it does not model Cross River Rail, future upgrades or fare changes.

Sources: ABS Suburbs & Localities; WorldPop 2020 population grid; TransLink GTFS timetable; Google Directions (transit and traffic). Sample day Tuesday 18 August 2026. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Rebuilt 2026-07-17 after r/brisbane feedback.