Page 3560 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 24 November 2021
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the chamber that we have to socially distance and protect everyone and then I get an email yesterday from a parent who has children at Mount Stromlo. I will read part of it:
My 2 sons catch Bus 2054 from Wright to Mount Stromlo High School. In the morning, there are 2 buses. In the afternoon, prior to the August lock-down, it was a bendy bus in the afternoon. The boys tell me that even with this size bus/buses, the trip is quite crowded.
At the start of November when all years were back at school, they were only getting 1 single bus in the afternoon. After strict social distancing rules being enforced at school, it made them quite uneasy to be on a sardine like bus. One son who was particularly anxious about it has just started walking when he didn’t feel comfortable about being on the bus.
He said, “No, I’m not using the bus,” when he did not feel comfortable about being on the bus. This parent went on to say:
I contact the school who contacted Transport ACT and after about a week, the afternoon bendy bus returned.
Yesterday, the same day that parents were notified of a covid positive case in the school, they were back to a single bus in the afternoon.
A non-bendy, packed-in-like-sardines bus in the afternoon. The parent continued:
Even ignoring the current covid recommendations, surely there is a road safety issue of having a bus this full.
We get some mixed messages about how we are returning people to public transport. I have to say thanks to one of the minister’s backbench colleagues for her hard work on the “Her Way” report. Thanks to that, we have some excellent firsthand community insights into what is actually deflating confidence levels. Just quoting some of the examples from Dr Paterson’s reports, as collected through that online survey, these are some of the many negative comments in that report from constituents: “Public transport would be one and a half hours, compared with a 15-minute drive.” “There is no way I can rely on public transport to get my child to school and then go to work. It would take three hours on buses and be almost as expensive as parking.” “It takes 20 minutes to drive or ridiculously one hour, five minutes on the bus.” “More frequent buses are needed.” I could go on, because Dr Paterson’s report is a bit of a gem in this area. I know that we will be debating more of the substance of the “Her Way” report tomorrow and I look forward very much to doing that.
The budget sets aside $45 million, of course, for the elevation of London Circuit to make way for the light rail route to Commonwealth Park and eventually Woden, as we mentioned earlier. This involves blocking off most of Commonwealth Avenue as it approaches Civic. It promises to be one of the great traffic disasters of the ACT’s history. I note advice went out to public servants in the parliamentary triangle earlier in the week warning them of what a disaster that will be.
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