Page 3135 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019
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10 weeks of the new public transport network there were over 4.5 million boardings recorded on buses and light rail services and over 3.3 million journeys.
Just on the weekend there were 1,377 extra services timetabled as part of the new network. Passenger patronage numbers have increased alongside the increase in services. On an average weekend under the network there have been 11,000 more journeys taken on public transport, compared to the same weekends in 2018. Granted, despite this increase, service reliability has been an issue for passengers and the transport network, and this has not met community expectations or the expectations of the government. We have been actively working on solutions to improve the reliability rate of our weekend services.
On the new network, rapid services make up 70 per cent of boardings. Services are starting earlier and running later than the previous network. While reliability rates are not meeting our targets because of the total increase in services, there are still more buses running more often across our city at more hours of the day. Importantly, as a key element of the redesigned network, weekend services now use the same route number as weekday services.
I have been up-front in acknowledging that weekend reliability of bus services has not met the expectations of Canberrans and the government, and we have been up-front that we are working on a number of solutions to improve reliability on the weekends. I made that clear in my answer to Miss C Burch’s question in question time and in the debate in relation to the motion on private members’ day last week as well.
The ACT government is working hard to ensure that Canberrans can rely on their weekend buses, and this takes work. Unfortunately for our customers, this also takes time. The first step was to implement a rolling recruitment strategy for Transport Canberra bus drivers. This was planned leading into the new network and we have stepped it up, following the unsatisfactory reliability of the weekend network.
The second step, which I announced on Friday, was to make adjustments to the frequency of the weekend bus timetable as we continue to recruit more bus drivers to our ranks and look at a range of other actions to improve reliability and deliver weekend services. This piece of work requires the assistance of the Transport Workers Union and drivers to ensure that frequency adjustments to the weekend timetable will deliver reliability while we recruit more bus drivers to deliver extra services. These adjustments are proposed to be finalised and in action for the first weekend of the spring school holidays, which is from 28 September onwards.
Adjustments are necessary because the scale of the changes that were made under the new network were unprecedented across a network of around 450 buses and around 800 drivers, who, each weekend, are scheduled to run over 3,700 services, each made up of a shift for a driver and an appropriately sized bus which may deliver multiple different services throughout the day. There is a complexity to the transport network that goes beyond simple rhetoric.
We have been called on to provide certainty by the Wednesday before weekend cancellations. This is not currently possible, for two reasons. It is not how scheduling
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