Trams were done away with in 1969. The beginning of the end of trams was a fire in 1962 at the Paddington Dept that destroyed the about a quarter of the fleet. Much of Brisbane is hilly with winding streets, and trams took up too much space on the roads due to the need for cars to stop everytime the tram did.

Brisbane’s once-extensive tram network, which boasted over 100km of track, was dismantled in 1969 due to a perfect storm of political and logistical factors. The turning point was a devastating depot fire in 1962 at Paddington, which destroyed 65 trams—roughly 20% of the entire fleet. Rather than rebuilding, the city's leadership at the time, particularly Lord Mayor Clem Jones, favored a "car-centric" future. The rise of private motorcar ownership among Australian families and a pro-freeway political agenda made the aging tram system seem obsolete compared to the flexibility of diesel buses. While many modern residents now lament the loss, the 1960s saw a global trend of "modernizing" cities by removing rail in favor of asphalt, a decision that transformed Brisbane's urban layout and shifted its public transit focus entirely toward buses and eventually a suburban rail network.