Page 5153 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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minutes slower, five minutes slower, five minutes slower, nine minutes slower, three minutes slower, nine minutes slower, four minutes slower, five minutes slower. Not until 8.29 am is it possible to go from a Gungahlin suburb, through the Gungahlin Marketplace and on to the city on a Redex in a faster time. And how much faster is it? It is two minutes faster. So we are spending a million dollars to get a service which is two minutes faster and involves a connection.
Of the 50 comparisons I have done, of the 50 services each day between the city and Gungahlin suburbs, 46 of them are faster on existing services. On only four of them are you actually faster on a Redex. We are spending a million dollars on this trial for a service which is going to be slower for 92 per cent of the time. If the 40,000 constituents in Gungahlin who normally get the 51, 52 or 59 bus were to use the Redex service, they would be slower 92 per cent of the time than if they stayed on their normal route bus. These are facts. The only way that somebody would actually make the most of the Redex service would be if they got a lift to, got dropped off at or drove to the Gungahlin Marketplace.
So it seems to me that we have got a park and ride but with no park, because the only parking spaces that are available in Gungahlin at the moment are pretty much in the G shopping centre or in the Marketplace shopping centre. What is going to happen if you want to get in to work for 9 o’clock? Say you want to get on the Redex at 8.01 am, which gets you in at 8.35 am. You are going to drive in to the Marketplace and you will get a nice spot, under cover, right by the escalators. You will go up the escalators, hop on to your bus and you will go into the city. And a few other people might have this same idea as well—there might be a few hundred people—to get there nice and early, park in the undercover car park at the Gungahlin Marketplace or the G shopping centre, park right next to the door, go upstairs, hop on to a bus and go into the city.
Those people might never spend a dollar at the Gungahlin Marketplace or the G shopping centre, yet those businesses would be providing the parking—and they would be losing money because for the rest of the day all the parking spots right next to the door would be taken up by commuters. Park and ride is a good concept, but why should these businesses have to cop it? Why shouldn’t the ACT government provide the park and ride stations? It seems to me this whole idea is very poorly thought out.
The Greens, Ms Le Couteur and Ms Bresnan, asked what we have got against trials. In this case it is a million dollars being spent on the exact same route as the No 5 service. That was the trial. The No 5 service has been in operation since network 08. There is your trial. Why don’t we just look at the timetables of the No 5 service? Why don’t we look at the patronage of that? Why do we have to rebrand it? Why do we have to spend a fortune on promotion to brand something which is the same as the No 5 service?
It is not surprising that my office has been contacted by a number of transport economists and also by a number of bus drivers who have expressed concern about the way this whole thing is panning out. When you look at it, you have got a park and ride without the park, and you have got a Redex express service which is not an express. You have also got a connection service that you cannot connect to. It is all
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