Page 1280 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 11 April 2018
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strong patronage growth, with nearly 200,000 more passenger boardings than the target set by the government, reflects significant improvements to our public transport network in recent years, particularly including the introduction of new rapid routes.
Today Miss Burch made a claim in her media release about this motion that the government has forgotten to factor people into its bus network. This might be a cute line but it is clearly debunked by our strong patronage growth and by the government’s continued commitment to investing in public transport for our community. The government has expanded our bus network based on what people told us they wanted: more buses, more often. We are delivering on our commitments to provide more rapid bus services for Canberrans and they are voting with their feet.
We are particularly pleased with the strong patronage growth on the green rapid service. Despite being introduced only in October last year, the green rapid is already one of the busiest routes in our city’s public transport network. I am pleased to advise that patronage on our bus services continued to grow strongly in this financial year, with Transport Canberra on track to exceed this year’s target of 18.4 million passenger boardings.
A level of late and early running across the network is expected due to the buses mostly being part of the mixed traffic environment, which is why variance is provided in the performance measure. Canberra’s road traffic congestion is highly variable. For example, mid-week road congestion is worse than Monday or Friday congestion, and road congestion is noticeably reduced during school holidays, as any Canberran who drives to work next Monday morning will be able to attest to.
Transport Canberra runs a fixed weekday timetable every weekday and across both school and non-school periods, which leads to buses running faster or slower on different days. For example, Transport Canberra buses record a higher incidence of late running on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday than on Monday and Friday.
Major projects such as road works also contribute to reducing road congestion and they certainly make it easier for Canberrans to move around our city once they are completed. Examples of this, of course, include the Cotter Road duplication and road works throughout the Gungahlin region. On-time running is expected to increase as construction works around Civic are also completed.
Service planners in Transport Canberra also continue to use performance data from the MyWay and NXTBUS systems to identify problematic running of services and publish revised timetables to deliver an improved service outcome, as operational requirements allow.
Members may not be aware that there is no agreed standard in the public transport sector for the measurement of on-time performance. On-time performance in most jurisdictions is often tied to performance contracts. A Transport Canberra bus is deemed to be on time when it departs a scheduled timing point within one minute earlier and four minutes later than scheduled. This is considerably more stringent than the on-time running performance measures applied in many comparable Australian and international cities. For example, in Brisbane, TransLink measures on-time as up
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