Page 853 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 6 April 2022
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Making public transport free would further reduce revenues by around $1.2 million a month, or $1.8 million for six weeks, which could only undermine the quality and sustainability of services in the longer term. So really what Mr Parton is talking about is cutting public transport, and we simply do not believe in cutting public transport. We support better public transport, investing in our public transport system. To return to PTCBR’s point of view about what Canberrans really want, making public transport better is our very strong focus.
People want reliable and accessible public transport services that turn up on time and efficiently take them to where they want to go. That is what we have been working hard to achieve through the COVID-19 pandemic, as we have seen unprecedented changes in how Canberrans travel and huge disruptions to the availability of workers to deliver these essential services.
In August last year we put into place an interim timetable to ensure that we could continue to deliver reliable services in the face of these challenges. This interim timetable provides a good level of frequency, with most rapids running at least every 15 minutes during the day or better, and around every half an hour after 8 pm during the week. The Rapid 10 and all local services run at least every 30 minutes. At the start of term 1, 2022, we augmented this with 233 dedicated school services as students returned to the classroom and parents returned to work.
Transport Canberra’s priority is to offer reliable transport services for Canberrans, both during the week and on the weekends. Cancelled services and missed trips are a huge frustration for regular public transport users and a strong disincentive for potential users to give their local bus route a try. We will not make any headway in driving a long-term shift to public transport if people do not believe that the services will reliably turn up, and turn up on time when and where they want to use them.
Like many workplaces across Canberra and Australia, Transport Canberra is continuing to experience workforce issues as a result of the ongoing impact of COVID-19. We are seeing an average of around 35 drivers per day unavailable for work at the moment, placing pressure on our remaining workforce.
While we are working towards returning to the full pre-COVID timetable as soon as possible, at present this is not possible while ensuring reliable services. For this reason, we will be retaining the interim timetable for a further period, extending into term 2 of the ACT school year. Yesterday this advice was provided to all ACT schools and to commuters via a range of channels so that people know what to expect in the weeks ahead. We will continue to monitor workforce availability, in parallel with the health situation and advice, and have identified regular internal checkpoints to review the appropriateness of continuing with interim services.
Parallel with planning for a return to the pre-COVID timetable when possible, we are continuing to find ways to encourage Canberrans to return to public transport, but in line with our ACT transport recovery plan released in April last year. Our goal is to get public transport patronage back to pre-COVID levels and then keep on growing it. We have seen a great improvement in patronage through the early part of this year,
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