Best Gold Coast suburbs for public transport

Southport tops the ranking, with 497.5 scheduled peak-hour arrivals an hour. Surfers Paradise and Mermaid Beach round out the top three. These 15 suburbs came from a field of 69 eligible Gold Coast suburbs.

Each eligible Gold Coast suburb is scored on a composite transport-quality signal blended with walkability, safety, and CBD access. The transport-quality signal itself blends peak-hour (7-9am + 5-7pm) and off-peak weekday arrivals, Saturday service, median headway, span-of-service, mode weighting (rail > tram > bus), and peak-hour direct-CBD headway. The composite carries the heaviest weight in the final score (60%); percentile ranks are computed within Gold Coast's candidate pool, not nationally.

Every state government publishes a GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) timetable feed covering all scheduled buses, trains, trams, and ferries in the state. We ingest these feeds and aggregate arrivals across every stop inside each suburb boundary on a representative Wednesday and Saturday. Nothing paid, nothing scraped — it's the same data that powers the transit-planner apps.

No — scheduled service only. GTFS-realtime feeds carry delays and cancellations but they're per-agency, per-day, and not part of this ingest. A suburb whose bus network runs 20 minutes late every peak still scores here on the timetable. Reliability data is a candidate for a future layer.

The top 15 is recomputed whenever we re-run the GTFS aggregation pipeline. Feeds themselves refresh weekly to monthly per agency; big service changes (a new metro line, a route reshuffle) land in the next re-computation.