Page 1276 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 11 April 2018
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I rise today to speak today about the problems we are encountering with Canberra’s public transport. Late buses are having a significant impact on the reliability of the bus network and are letting down the many Canberrans who depend on bus services to get them to and from work, school and other commitments. The government won the last election with a plan to deliver better transport, and the people of Canberra are still waiting for them to deliver.
Transport Canberra tells us that the bus network is as busy as it has ever been and their statistics support this. This is good. We want more Canberrans to be using public transport. However, network punctuality continues to let Canberrans down. Fewer than 73 per cent of buses are on time. That means that almost 30 per cent of buses are not on time. This is not good enough. All too often, buses are arriving late or departing early.
The government has met ACTION’s punctuality benchmarks in only two of the 90 weeks since mid-2016. These two weeks were the weeks around Christmas and New Year when far fewer people are using the public transport network. This shows that the government has designed a public transport system that seems to work best when people are not using it.
ACTION’s punctuality benchmark was previously set to 80 per cent. However, in the 2016-17 financial year, this target was not met once. Instead of addressing the problem, the government reduced ACTION’s punctuality benchmark to 75 per cent. Despite this lower target, this target has now only been met twice.
Minister Fitzharris has blamed late buses on roadworks. She is right; light rail construction has caused enormous disruption and delays to traffic, as have other major road duplications. However, none of these roadworks should have been a surprise to the minister or her directorate. These disruptions were entirely predictable. It is the minister and her directorate who set the schedule of roadworks and control the bus timetables. Why, then, have they not changed the bus timetables to account for the planned roadworks?
Part of the reason buses are often late, is that around 14 per cent of services do not commence at their scheduled start time. Interestingly, almost as many services commence early as those that commence late. This raises a lot of questions as early buses can be just as troublesome to commuters as late buses if commuters unknowingly miss their bus.
Why are buses starting early? Are drivers starting their routes earlier to accommodate for anticipated delays? If drivers can anticipate these delays, why cannot timetables? If drivers are adjusting the times of their routes to make up for shortcomings in the timetable, then surely it is the timetable that need adjusting. Why are buses starting late? How can we have confidence that buses will run to timetable if they do not even start at the correct time?
The success of Canberra’s public transport network depends upon on its reliability. Canberrans deserve to know that when they use public transport it will get them
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