Running in Brisbane

Because the Brisbane River winds through the middle of the city in a series of sharp bends, almost every loop route in the inner city is really a choice of which bridge to cross. The Story Bridge, Goodwill Bridge, Kurilpa Bridge, Victoria Bridge, and William Jolly Bridge each connect different sections of the Riverwalk and riverside parks, so runners can shorten or extend a loop simply by picking an earlier or later crossing. This makes it easy to design a route of almost any distance without leaving the river corridor, which is part of why the river paths stay so busy with locals rather than just tourists.

The pedestrian only Kurilpa Bridge and Goodwill Bridge are particularly popular with runners because they avoid the traffic and wider road crossings that come with using the Story Bridge or Victoria Bridge. Many regulars build a mental map of the bridge network the same way they would learn a fixed loop elsewhere, mixing and matching crossings depending on how far they want to run that day. On weekend mornings, it is common to see runners cross one bridge, follow the opposite bank for a stretch, and return via a different bridge entirely, turning the river into a flexible grid rather than a single fixed path.

Brisbane's CityCat ferry network runs the length of the river and gives runners a genuinely useful tool that most cities without a river transit system simply do not have. Rather than running an out and back route, it is common for Brisbane runners to start at one ferry terminal, run point to point along the river, and catch a CityCat back to the starting point instead of retracing their steps. This turns a standard riverside loop into a one way run, which many locals find more interesting than doubling back over the same path.

The ferries call at stops close to several of the riverside neighbourhoods already popular with runners, including New Farm and South Bank, so it is easy to plan a route that ends near a terminal without much extra research. For visitors unfamiliar with the city, using the CityCat this way is also a low effort way to see more of the river corridor than a single out and back run would allow. On hot Brisbane mornings, finishing a run with a breezy ferry ride back along the water is also simply a pleasant way to cool down. Trail-focused locals often pair a flat river run like this with a weekend session on the Mount Coot-tha network for elevation, treating the two as complementary rather than competing options.