Page 4666 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019
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them well, and the fact that many commuters were now facing an additional six or seven hours a week on the bus just to get to work. Once again, the government continued to ignore these concerns. As a result, many of these Canberrans have also returned to their vehicles.
Then rolled around D-day, 29 April. The new integrated transport network was unveiled with a $400,000 launch party that ran well over budget. Patronage in the first month of travel was up, but it was not long until the chaos set in. News article after news article about the network was published, with each one shedding more and more light about the concerns of ordinary, hardworking Canberrans raised just months before.
The headlines really speak for themselves. On 1 May the Canberra Times headline read, “Bus changes leave students in the lurch”. The article stated that school students at St Vincent’s primary would lose the equivalent of nine days of school time because of increased journey times the new network brought. On 2 May the headline read, “Record numbers of ACT public transport students left behind”, and on 4 May the headline was, “Bus timetable leaves children in tears”. What was the reply of this government? The minister called the network a great success.
In July this year the network claimed its first casualty—thankfully not a patron of the network but the transport minister herself. With Minister Fitzharris gone, Chief Minister Barr passed the buck to Minister Steel. Promising the world, Minister Steel vowed he would turn things around, starting with reliability issues that plagued the weekend network.
That brings us to 15 August, when the new transport minister agreed to an action plan to resolve the huge number of weekend service cancellations. Very conveniently he failed to mention that he planned to drastically cut weekend suburban services with an announcement made the very next day.
In the September sitting Minister Steel detailed several key goals and milestones under his action plan and rolled out a brand new weekend bus timetable that left Canberrans stranded in the suburbs for up to two hours. What the minister did not detail was any concrete date for restoring these services or any real solution to long-term reliability.
Minister Steel also released the ACT government response to the impact of network 19 on school students and attempted to use dodgy statistics to gloss over the safety concerns of thousands of parents. His claims that more and more students were using the public network were skewed by weekend patronage data. These claims did nothing to ease the concerns of parents like Daniel from Gungahlin. In response to school service cuts, Daniel wrote:
This has forced our younger K-6 students onto public transport. My youngest daughter goes to Amaroo and is in year 6. Recently she and one of her friends have been having very uncomfortable experiences on the public bus where an older man has been getting on to the bus … next to my daughter despite the fact there are plenty of free seats on the bus to choose ... gets off at the School stop and proceeds to walk with my daughter up to the school gates.
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