Page 1752 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 15 May 2019
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The government heard concerns raised during consultation, and made changes to rapid and local services across 58 routes in response to community feedback. Some of these changes included: extending the rapid 4 to provide a frequent, direct rapid service between Belconnen, the city, Woden and Tuggeranong; all local buses from Weston Creek and Molonglo now provide access to the Woden town centre; introducing peak bus routes to the city and Barton from south Tuggeranong suburbs; and introducing an additional route and other service changes to local services to provide better coverage for suburbs in south-west Belconnen in particular. The government also included an additional 78 dedicated school services in the network, a 50 per cent increase over the number initially proposed during consultation.
In designing the new network Transport Canberra had to consider not only existing bus users but also potential future users. It is the government’s aim to increase the number of Canberrans catching public transport. With our current figure of eight per cent we lag significantly behind other Australian cities and other cities in our region in providing more options to use public transport and increasing the percentage of Canberrans using public transport.
We want more people to use public transport, and that is what we are seeing today. The simple fact is this: continuing to do what we have done in the past was not going to result in a material increase in public transport usage. That is why we invested in light rail and it is why we have redesigned the bus network. Building a new bus network is a complex task; transport networks are also a network of interconnected parts that work together to provide a city-wide service.
Having a system as we previously did based on long, windy, bespoke point-to-point services is not an efficient way to plan a network. In previous debates in this place in the last term the Canberra Liberals noted that. Something the Canberra Liberals have not brought to the more recent debate is any policy framework to their belief on how they would design a new public transport network.
The debate has been utterly devoid of any options that the Canberra Liberals would seek to undertake and any acknowledgement at all of what it takes to build and deliver an integrated network that will drive patronage and give more people more choice and give Canberrans what they have asked for for a long time: frequent reliable routes. Turn-up-and-go services like the rapid services have been proven locally, nationally and internationally to drive a big uptake in patronage.
Many factors go into the design of a public transport network, including providing more regular school services past schools to improve public transport options for everyone. Running a dedicated service on occasion carrying only a handful of students alongside a regular service does not make sense from an efficiency point of view. It does, however, make sense to run increased regular services past schools.
Many members of the community may not be aware that schools in Canberra have very different bell times. Schools adjacent to one another may finish 10, 15 or 20Â minutes apart or, indeed, start at different times in the mornings. This means that it is not always possible to provide a bus service for each school at the optimal time;
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