Page 4066 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 30 November 2022
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First, I want to have a bit of a chat about the data. We have taken our data from census data, from BITRE, the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, and from state and territory data. I think Mr Parton’s data is mostly coming from RiotACT below-the-line comments, and I suggest expanding that a little bit.
Mr Parton notes in his motion that public transport mode share is not increasing in the ACT. He is right to talk about that, but his reasoning about why is false. He seems to be saying that the introduction of light rail, or the introduction of network 19, caused a drop in public transport, and that is simply not the case. Our public transport usage has plateaued in Canberra for some time. That occurred before COVID. That occurred independently of COVID. For a long time we seemed unable to entice more users onto our system, and it has been a problem for decades.
Data from BITRE shows that Canberra had more public transport usage on route buses in 1985 than it did in 2013. That certainly matches my recollections of Canberra. My dad was a senior public servant. He caught the bus to work. My friends do not. But light rail has fixed that problem. In April 2019 light rail started running. It was a resounding success almost immediately. In Gungahlin it is more obvious than anywhere else. The daily average number of journeys by bus and light rail in Gungahlin in the third quarter of 2019 was up 29 per cent on the previous year. Before light rail we had low public transport use; immediately after its introduction, public transport usage leapt by 29 per cent. That is a big tick for light rail.
In February 2020, Minister Steel announced clear evidence that our patronage on Canberra’s public transport network was growing. He said there were 36 per cent more journeys made on public transport for the 2020 Multicultural Festival than for the 2019 festival. He also reported higher public transport usage at the start of 2020, including crowding on the R10 from Molonglo.
In April 2021, Minister Steel announced further results of the new integrated light rail and bus network. He said that, before COVID, we had an average of 15,047 passenger boardings each day, which was higher than expected. Ninety-four per cent of customers were satisfied with light rail, and services had to be increased to accommodate demand.
The Clay office is not simply reading from Minister Steel’s press releases. We have interrogated this data. As I said before, we have looked at the census data, we have looked at BITRE, we have looked at state and territory data, and we have looked at other sources. We have been out talking to people, we have conducted research, we have spoken to our constituents and we have spoken to stakeholders.
Where light rail has been introduced, we now have a thriving public transport system. We have a positive change of direction after what was a really long period of stagnation. Surveys of light rail users show that more than 43 per cent had never used public transport before catching light rail. These are the people we need to reach. I want Belconnen and the whole city to share in this as soon as possible.
Mr Parton’s motion seems to say that network 19 and light rail resulted in a decrease in public transport patronage before the pandemic. That is simply not true. The figures
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