Page 4663 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019

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(1) notes that:

(a) since the last motion debating Canberra’s bus network (dated 14 August 2019), with regard to weekend buses:

(i) the Minister for Transport agreed to a motion calling on the Government to produce a Weekend Bus Service Reliability Action Plan on 15 August 2019;

(ii) on 15 August 2019, the Minister for Transport claimed the priority of the ACT Government was on bus driver recruitment and volunteer uptake of weekend services, but has not done anything to incentivise an uptake in weekend shifts;

(iii) the Minister for Transport announced cuts to weekend bus service frequency to every two hours for suburban services on 16 August 2019;

(iv) the Minister for Transport released the details of the Weekend Bus Service Reliability Action Plan on 28 September 2019;

(v) the Minister for Transport released a substantively new weekend bus timetable on 28 September 2019;

(vi) the 2018-19 Transport Canberra and City Services Annual Report states that “service reliability on weekends has been well below the target”;

(vii) as per a Freedom of Information request provided on 8 November 2019, the Government did not know how many drivers it needed to recruit to be able to service the whole network as of July 2019;

(viii) the Minister for Transport provided a Quarterly Update on the Transport Action Plan in October 2019, which stated that “incrementally increasing weekend services to meet the Network19 plan” had “not yet commenced”; and

(ix) when providing the quarterly update on the Transport Action Plan to the Assembly on 24 October 2019, the Minister refused to provide a resolution date to the weekend network reliability issues;

(b) since the last motion debating Canberra’s Bus Network (dated 14 August 2019), with regard to suburban bus services:

(i) fewer Canberrans in the suburbs of Belconnen, Woden and Tuggeranong are using the public bus network, as per patronage data released in late August 2019;

(ii) there has been a survey undertaken by the Women’s Centre for Health Matters in relation to women’s safety on public transport due to ongoing safety concerns with waiting at bus stops and long walking distances at night;

(iii) data from the 2018-19 Annual Reports showed that the bus network failed to achieve its 99.5 percent target for “Services Operated to Completion”;

(iv) data from the 2018-19 Annual Reports depicted a 21 percent decrease in overall network satisfaction from 83 percent in 2017-18 to 62 percent in 2018-19;


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