Page 2747 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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The government also needs to collect and table actual data about the amount of freight passing through urban Canberra, its origins and destinations, and the expected amount that a Majura freeway would divert. The government has no real data on this. I also point out to the Assembly that the estimates committee specifically recommended that the government provide this freight data. Yet the government and the Liberals have voted against the same request in my motion.
I would also like to make some further remarks in regard to ACTION. These are more specific comments about the operation of the actual buses as opposed to the wider planning and prioritising issues I have just raised.
One of the first issues that concerned me when I read the budget papers was the poor reliability statistics for ACTION buses. (Second speaking period taken.) I am sure all members know about the problems posed by poor bus reliability. People are frustrated, inconvenienced and discouraged from using buses. The budget shows that ACTION is only achieving an 83 per cent timeliness rate for its buses. As a comparison, the level of reliability achieved by New South Wales and Victorian bus services are 95 per cent and 96 per cent respectively. This does need urgent improvement.
I asked about reliability through the questions on notice process. The response stated that places such as New South Wales, with its high reliability figures, based its results on manual reporting whereas the ACT was moving to real-time reporting. The problem with this is that it is not an excuse. As Mr Corbell admitted in the actual hearing, the low reliability figures listed in the budget are also the result of manual reporting. It is only now, for the upcoming year, that the ACT is changing to real-time reporting. The ACT’s low results are comparable to other jurisdictions which use the same method. These other jurisdictions are achieving considerably better results. I therefore repeat again my call for immediate action to improve public transport reliability in the ACT, which should be a priority. The people in the community deserve it, and a government committed to public transport should prioritise this.
Another reliability issue that is ongoing is the issue of bike racks on buses. We have raised this many times on behalf of the community, but we are not seeing improvements. The first problem is that the government now says that not all buses can be retrofitted to take bike racks and therefore it will not achieve the 100 per cent availability of bike racks on buses. I remind the government that on a number of occasions it promised that all ACTION buses would have bike racks.
The second problem is the lack of reliability of bike racks on buses and the lack of monitoring of this. The former minister for TAMS, Mr Stanhope, promised the Assembly that monitoring would be thorough. However, this is not occurring and the government is now saying that it does not intend to measure it. This means that bike riders using the ACTION network cannot rely on buses arriving with a bike rack even when it is scheduled to have one. That is quite a disincentive when we want to strongly encourage people to utilise bikes and buses. I note that in response to my suggestion, the government has said that it will at least consider including a budget indicator that shows the percentage of buses that have bike racks. That would be a start, and it should be done in the interest of probity.
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