Page 3825 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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announced and is consulting on at the moment because, unless that consultant had some local knowledge, then he really needed a great deal of community input. That is the community input that we lost with that committee, which was cut last year, which was an ACTION bus advisory committee.
Again yesterday, we had the announcement about free travel on buses for people with bikes. But it has been raised by people with me and other members that it is great that you can put your bike on the bus but how do you know which bus is capable of taking your bike? If you are sitting there waiting for a bus to get to work, how can you know? There are real issues about this. It also raises a problem about people in wheelchairs. We know there is a problem with wheelchair-accessible transport at the moment.
Members interjecting—
DR FOSKEY: I am going to keep speaking because I have got a bit to say and I do not want to wait for everyone to have their little jokes. It actually is not a laughing matter. If you want to get to work and you want to take your bike because you have ridden to the bus stop, you want to know that a bus capable of carrying your bike is going to come along at a time that will get you to work. So we need to know the predictability of buses. We need a way that people can find out.
Mr Hargreaves: Ultimately there will be bike racks on all buses.
DR FOSKEY: If the minister for buses is not interested in hearing this, then I am not quite sure how the consultation on buses is going to go.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Dr Foskey has the floor.
DR FOSKEY: The other issue is people in wheelchairs. This has been brought to me by that sector. We have got huge problems with taxis. I know that there are real efforts going on in TAMS to deal with that because I have had a briefing about it, but until the issue with taxis—and remember it is still going to cost a certain amount of money—is fixed, people need to know they can take their wheelchairs onto buses. At the moment, it is not predictable when a wheelchair-accessible bus will come along.
We have a text messaging service that tells people the timetable but it does not tell people what kind of bus is going to come along. So it seems to me that we should make more use of our websites, our modern technologies and the transit text messaging service so that the bus services can be really helpful to the people who need them most.
The other issue that I wanted to raise about buses is that, while the community bus is a really good initiative, that seems to me to need a lot more fleshing out so that we know how much it really is going to help people. Remember that the level of patronage before those budget cuts was much higher than it was after them. We were actually running a bus service as part of a sustainable transport plan and we have to get back to that. I welcome Mr Stanhope’s statement in his tabling speech:
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