Page 4675 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019
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motion would mean a wholesale throwing out of network 19, and I am not in support of that at the cost of my constituents in these areas. The Greens will instead be voting to keep the good and popular parts of network 19 but try to fix the parts that are not working so well. That is the sensible, logical thing to do. We will vote for the ALP amendment but hope to make it much stronger with my amendment, which also covers the weekday bus services for Woden Valley, Belconnen and Tuggeranong.
As I said, network 19 has been a case of people who win out, people who miss out and a botched rollout. This is clear in the patronage stats for the past three months, from July to September 2019, compared to the same period in 2018. Over that time, overall patronage was six per cent more. Tick. Full fare patronage was 16 per cent higher. Even more of a tick. School student patronage was two per cent higher. That is probably just population growth. Concession patronage was two per cent higher. Again, that is probably just population growth. But the more surprising thing was that tertiary student patronage was two per cent lower.
This is mostly good news, but when you look at it by district, the pattern of winners and losers becomes clear. As Miss C Burch’s motion says, in some districts starts measured by MyWay cards are down for the three months from July to September 2019 when compared to 2018. Woden Valley journey starts are down five per cent; Belconnen is down four per cent; Tuggeranong is down two per cent. But in my electorate, Weston Creek is up 12 per cent and Molonglo Valley is up 25 per cent.
Then we come to the botched rollout at the weekends. Weekend MyWay patronage, comparing June 2019 to June 2018, was up by 36 per cent, which is brilliant. Weekend patronage growth was still an excellent 27 per cent during the July to September quarter, but clearly faded compared to July as service cancellations of over 10 per cent of services took their toll on public confidence. The story that Miss Burch told of someone waiting at Woden for the R4 is very regrettable, but not, unfortunately, surprising.
Mr Steel’s amendment shows that by October, after weekend services on local routes were reduced to two-hourly, the year-on-year increase was down to 20.7 per cent. This is not surprising. It could have been worse. Two-hourly services do not work for weekend commuters. They do not work for people going to an appointment. They are a complete disaster for anyone connecting from one local service to another. They are just too inflexible for anyone who wants to go out over the weekend. The problem is getting enough weekend drivers. The best part of network 19, the part that Canberrans were really keen on, was the part that did not work because of not enough drivers.
I hope the weekend patronage growth now stabilises at at least 20 per cent higher, to remind everyone in the Assembly and the directorate of what can be achieved when a truly better service is provided and to provide encouragement to get weekend local services back to one-hourly, preferably even better than that, as soon as possible.
Miss Burch’s motion has a number of sensible notes and sensible calls, but critically the only way to deliver the other calls would be to completely throw out network 19, which we are not going to do because it substantially benefits a large number of people, including many of those in my electorate.
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