Page 5154 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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very well to have a 15-minute frequency, a 15-minute rapid service; but if the feed-in service is not at that same level of consistency, at that same rapid extent, you are going to be held up by whatever your route service is. And let us not forget that every route service is going on to the city anyway on the same roads. So the time it is going to take to wait at a bus stop is the time that you could have spent at your destination. The time between getting off your route bus and waiting for a Redex is where the fat is in this system.
There is way too much fat in this system. This system is totally dependent upon people being at the Gungahlin Marketplace. As anybody who has been to Gungahlin knows, there are not that many houses, there are not that many residents, in the Gungahlin Marketplace. In and around the Gungahlin town centre there are not that many residents. I think we need to have more residents there. We need to have more commercial activity there as well. But there are not that many residents, so somehow people have to get to the Gungahlin Marketplace.
I looked earlier at the stats of going into the city. The stats going away from the city in the afternoon are actually quite stark. Again, it is all very well to have a 15-minute service from the city going to the Gungahlin Marketplace. But, if you have got to wait for a connection at the Gungahlin Marketplace, you are only as fast as your last connection. So, for instance, if you wanted to get the No 51 bus, which leaves the Gungahlin Marketplace at 3.50, you could just hop on it in the city at 3.28 or you could get the 3.25 Redex service to make the connection—three minutes slower. If you want to get the No 52 bus, which leaves the Gungahlin Marketplace at 4.03, you could just get the No 52 bus in the city at 3.41 or you could get the Redex to connect at 3.25—leaving 16 minutes earlier in the city to catch the bus.
If you look at the afternoon routes, they range from being a minute slower through to 16 minutes slower. If you are going to Nicholls, Ngunnawal, Amaroo or Forde in the afternoon, it is absolutely impossible to use the Redex service to get there faster than you would on a 51, 52 or 59—absolutely impossible.
It is all very well to say that this is a trial and we have got to give it a go. But this trial has not been thought out very well at all. It is a million dollars of taxpayers’ money that could have been spent better. For every single one of the 28 services that go from the city to the Gungahlin Marketplace—for every single one of them—you are better off sticking to your existing route service than getting on your route service and changing at the Gungahlin Marketplace.
It seems to me that this service has not been very well thought out. It seems to me that this government are quite anti small business, because they are taking up small business car parks. The Gungahlin traders are already doing it tough. They are doing it tough because there is very little commercial activity out there other than retail. The only incentive people have to go to Gungahlin Marketplace is the convenience of the free parking. If that parking is no longer free, or it is no longer available because hundreds of commuters are treating it as a park and ride station because this government will not invest in a park and ride in Gungahlin, it would be a real tragedy for the Gungahlin traders. They are already doing it tough, and they are going to be doing it much tougher because of what this government have done in not planning
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