Page 4676 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019
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Miss Burch calls for reopening 752 bus stops that have closed. You cannot do that without a wholesale return to the previous network. It is the same thing with the restoration of the dedicated school services that we moved from network 19. Where are these buses going to come from? We do not have a separate school bus service in the ACT. A bus might do an R7 down to Weston Creek, then a school run to Weston Creek and then a local service in another part of Canberra. If we put back under-utilised school services, that would mean fewer buses available for busier school routes and commuters, especially in what is the crunch time morning peak.
Clearly part of the solution to this problem—which the Greens and I have been advocating forever—is more resources for our public transport system. That would obviously alleviate some problems, though I note that it is not one of Miss Burch’s calls. In the short run, looking at what we have, the patronage data does not make the case for reversing the changes to school services, because school use has not gone down.
Network 19 is a major shift in bus route design towards a hub-and-spoke approach. This, hopefully, is the correct move in terms of Canberra getting bigger. In the previous design, each route had been looked at for years and optimised. Hopefully, the local routes will get better on this one, it will be more optimal, and that hub-and-spoke will work. We have to give it longer. It can work.
One of the reasons that Weston Creek has much better patronage under network 19 is that Weston has become a significant hub. A quick local trip to the hub connects you to frequent and quick services to the city and Woden town centre, and also the services going to Tuggeranong via Kambah. This is much better than what was available before.
The ALP amendment is much better than the motion, but it is still not enough. On the positive side, it acknowledges that driver shortages for weekend services need to be fixed, and critically. It also commits to restoring the weekend bus services. This is very important in getting the Greens to vote for this amendment. We—and, I am sure, all the travelling public—want to get back to the full weekend services promised by network 19 as quickly as possible.
What the ALP amendment lacks is anything to address the fall in weekday journey starts in Woden, Belconnen and Tuggeranong. This is a real concern. Where are the approximately five per cent of people in each of these areas who used to catch the bus and are not anymore? What happened? We need to find out what happened, and to find out with enough detail to make changes so that they have similar gains in patronage to Weston Creek and Molonglo Valley. That would be ideal. The first step is to recognise that there is a problem during the week. My amendment recognises that.
The second step is to investigate why, and my amendment adds to this. In my previous lifetime I was an IT manager. I have spent hours and hours doing SQL queries of all sorts of data. The ACT government has a wealth of MyWay card data. Drilling into that data should be able to show us a lot more about what people did
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