Page 2918 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 14 August 2019
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At what point do we begin to realise the far-reaching consequences that cancelled weekend services are having on Canberrans? It is all too easy to view these failures as somebody else’s problem or to see them as numbers on a target board, but these failures involve real Canberrans waiting at bus stops and interchanges, desperate for weekend services that they can rely on.
If the government cannot deliver this today then they should at least have the common decency to pass on the information that they do have about future cancellations within adequate time frames. That is what my motion is calling on the government to do: to find ways to communicate with Canberrans, much earlier than 90 minutes beforehand, to inform them that their services are in fact being cancelled.
This order is not a tall one. Unlike the improvement in weekend services that we were promised, this is an initiative that the government can actually deliver. We know that the bus services roster is not finalised at 7 am on a Saturday, so we see little reason why the government cannot provide information about cancellations at least a few days prior.
This motion is just as much about the early notification of weekend cancellations as it is about reminding the government that they have failed to deliver a reliable weekend bus service. It is about reminding them that they could make the lives of weekend passengers much easier; they simply choose not to.
MR STEEL (Murrumbidgee—Minister for Community Services and Facilities, Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Minister for Transport and City Services) (3.46): I am very pleased to have another opportunity to provide a further update to members on our city’s public transport network, and I thank Miss C Burch for raising this issue. As everyone in this place would know, the ACT government has made some major improvements to our public transport network with more buses more often, same route, same number, on the weekend providing more services for Canberrans as a better alternative to using a car.
The improvements include the introduction of a range of different services, and I will highlight a few to begin with: expansion of the rapid network from 4 to 10 routes which also run on the weekend as well as on weekdays, including light rail for the first time, which has been a very reliable service; more bus services every day of the week; and an all-day seven-day network with a step change in service levels on weekends including the same routes as on weekdays and services that start earlier and run later.
The community has responded to that with a significant number of people taking more journeys on the weekend. Network 19 is keeping Canberrans connected with this extra service offering, providing shorter travel times that are getting our community to their destination as quickly as possible, particularly on the weekend. The scale of the increase in services has been significant, giving many Canberrans the opportunity to use public transport and making the network more attractive for those who can choose to drive but would prefer not to.
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