Page 579 - Week 02 - Thursday, 9 March 2006
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We see some of the roles of a demand-responsive transport system as being able to:
• move medium amounts of people—that, is too many for a taxi and too few for a bus—to and from places without an existing government bus route: the airport to the city or between federal government department buildings;
• service people who live in areas without existing or reliable government bus routes, such as the newer parts of Gungahlin, and especially school children who are at the moment a rather neglected prime group;
• service excursions for particular groups of people—for instance, aged care facility outings, preschools, childcare centres; and
• provide an efficient out-of-hours service for evenings and early mornings, perhaps even replacing underused flexibus services, and being a more affordable and more efficient option than taxi services.
Of course, the sky is probably the limit in terms of services that we can think of because, wherever more than three people need to go, there might be a place for such a service. People certainly need more transport options in Canberra than there are now. The need for this type of service in the evenings, in particular, is huge. Neither the ACTION bus service nor the taxi service is more than a partial solution to the problem. Many low income people, especially people who live in outer suburbs, who work night shifts, simply cannot rely on bus services to get to and from work and cannot afford to use taxis on a regular basis.
Public transport was cited by people on very low incomes interviewed by Peter Saunders—the New South Wales one, not the Melbourne one—the other day as a major reason that excludes them from the job market because many of the jobs that are available to them and that they could do involve evening work, such as the hospitality business. They simply cannot get there and back. So this effectively removes them from the flexible labour market that the commonwealth appears to be hell bent on creating.
Relying on a flexibus system that leaves interchanges once an hour could mean a two-hour trip to or from work if you do not work during the usual business hours. This, on top of doing a night shift, would be enough to make you purchase an inefficient, expensive-to-run and probably in need of regular-replacement-parts, car, which you would rather not have but which you need so that you can go to work. Of course you have to go to work so that you can pay for the petrol.
I hope that the market operators who will provide these demand-responsive transport services will find it profitable enough to run the services that are most needed by the community now and—and this is a big “and”—not just ones that they envisage will return the highest profit. This is the potential pitfall in the system. There is no stipulation in this bill, although the guidelines refer to it, for the provision of particular services for people in wheelchairs, people with disabilities or the aged. We hope that the government can come up with some incentives for operators to initiate services for these needs because, without government incentives it is very likely that these services will be very low on any operator’s priority list, due to the potentially lower profit margins.
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