Page 5141 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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for a mass public transit corridor—a real one, not a pretend one—and would provide expansion for future commuter growth and multistorey car park development.
The Canberra Liberals offer much more practical solutions to ensure that commuters have real options. The lengthy travel times that exist on the ACTION network have been caused by indirect suburban services and a lack of bus priority in key locations. Redex does nothing to address these issues. A $1 million investment in public transport could be spent in a number of ways to provide improvements to the bus network, including the park and ride facilities which I have already described. Better choice for commuters could occur with more direct services from Gungahlin suburbs to the Gungahlin town centre, then on to the city.
The Canberra Times got it seriously wrong yesterday in their puff piece for the Redex bus services. I will quote from the last line of the Canberra Times editorial:
Just consider—an express bus every 15 minutes from major centres. Now there’s a good idea.
Let me repeat that. This is the last line:
Just consider—an express bus every 15 minutes from major centres. Now there’s a good idea.
It seems to me that the intertown bus service already operates approximately every five minutes between major centres like Belconnen, the city, Woden and Tuggeranong. So what does the Canberra Times actually want to achieve here? The intertown is quite successful because of its frequency and reliability, but the problem that both the Canberra Times and the ACT government ignore is the challenge to get from the suburbs to that town centre. Redex does not address these problems in the network.
The new system has potential for worse bus bunching on Northbourne Avenue. Bus bunching occurs because of the way the schedules of various bus routes interact, meaning that some commuters will be waiting for extended periods at bus routes when there are large gaps, making it likely that buses will run late.
What can happen is that buses get held up in the left lane of roads because buses in front are stopping at a bus stop, thus holding up buses behind. To try and get around this, the Redex service will not be stopping at all stops along Northbourne Avenue. However, this will create further problems as there will be an incentive for the Redex services to occupy the middle lane on Northbourne Avenue between stops. This means you have buses changing lanes in peak hour to try and avoid bus bunching. This creates serious safety concerns.
I have also been made aware that the fuel cost and emissions from the dead running of buses between the depot and the starting point of the Redex route will be significant. Some of the buses will travel to and from the depot at Tuggeranong to start at Kingston, and other buses will travel from Belconnen to the starting point at Gungahlin. This will extend to hundreds and hundreds of kilometres per week of dead running.
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