Page 4667 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019
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In the October sitting the minister provided us with an update against the weekend bus action plan. It was an exercise in artful deception. The minister announced that reliability was back on track and that his action plan against the weekend network issues was working. Yet he has still not outlined any plans to incentivise weekend bus drivers to pick up weekend shifts and we still do not know when these weekend services will be restored.
His defence of the indefensible is shocking. In response to questions regarding the resolution of the weekend service issues he stated that there has been no change to the frequency of rapid services, which account for around 70 per cent of all boardings on weekends. This is an insult to Canberrans who rely on the other 30 per cent of services. It is an insult to Canberrans who live in the suburbs of Belconnen and Tuggeranong to parrot higher reliability figures for a weekend network timetable that bears no resemblance to the one that was promised. It is insult to Canberrans, like Mary from Kambah, who had a horror story about the rapid 4 on a Saturday afternoon. She wrote:
I arrived in Woden, parked and walked to the bus platform at 7pm. The scheduled 7.09 pm bus did not arrive. I still had time to catch the next bus, however it did not arrive either. By this time a group of about 12 people were waiting for this service.
I rang Transport Canberra and when I asked what time the next R4 was leaving Woden, the operator replied that there would be no more R4 services from Woden that night because there was not enough drivers to drive the buses. I told the people at the platform and they all said that no announcement had been made about this cancelled service.
I had not heard one either ... I know some of the people waiting were travelling home after work to families, some had to catch the light rail and others had to get to Belconnen.
Instead of being transparent with Canberrans, this minister has given us six months of political spin, empty statistics, hollow progress updates and broken promises. The minister conveniently left out of the action plan update speech any guarantee of a firm resolution date to the restoration of weekend service frequency that had been promised under network 19. It was only information contained within a freedom of information request that showed February 2020 as the next review date for service restoration. That is still three months away and Minster Steel has no intention of telling Canberrans this.
Just as disappointing is that the government promised that a new integrated ticketing system would be rolled out shortly after the commencement of light rail but they have since extended the MyWay ticketing contract to 2022. What are we to believe? The government has claimed that the procurement process has been underway for several years now. Is this another broken promise or will we suddenly see it appear as an ALP election commitment next year?
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