Page 479 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 February 2020
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
particular but in Weston Creek as well. I have been contacted by some of the people in Weston Creek who have been disadvantaged by the Xpresso services being cut. One of them was a woman. I am confident that, as a whole, patronage was probably up when her Xpresso service was cut. The buses were presumably redeployed to somewhere in the network that was previously under-served. It is understandable that she is unhappy.
One of the issues that we need to address is the under-resourcing of our bus networks. We need to look at a bus network which will better serve all Canberra. And I mention again one of the other issues in my electorate. On Beasley Street there are some aged care units which have a bus stop next to them. The bus stop is still there but no buses service it because Transport Canberra made the understandable decision that very few people wanted to use that bus stop because basically people would walk—most people, apart from the residents of the aged care units—to Athllon Drive which is only about another 250 metres away because there were much more frequent busses.
It was a plus for overall patronage but a minus for this particular group of people. And that has happened, as far as I can see, throughout the network rollout. Public servants have concentrated very much on solving the problems that they saw but in some instances this has been, unfortunately, at the cost of causing other problems. The issue really is: what do we do now? How do we fix the problems that I have talked about? The declining patronages in Woden, Tuggeranong and specific instances such as the aged persons units; how do we fix those problems while we keep the gains?
Miss Burch called for an apology. This Assembly, me included, has been very critical of Minister Steel at times when his actions have warranted it, particularly over his very regrettable decision to cut weekend bus services back to two-hourly on local routes. As one of the bus users in Canberra, I have to say I am actually very pleased that Miss Burch and the Liberals have made bus performance a political issue because I, as a public transport believer and a regular bus user, would like to see a lot more emphasis placed on public transport and buses in particular in Canberra.
But the problem is that an apology is not actually going to address the problems, although it obviously is a quite useful political stunt. An apology, to put it bluntly, will carry no passengers. Right now is the time to make changes to network 19 to fix those problems that it has caused some people and for some districts which have missed out, while keeping the good things that are causing more people to catch public transport overall.
It is also time to bring back as many of the weekend services as possible, and I am disappointed that we did not have a more complete answer to Mr Milligan’s questions yesterday on the subject of weekend bus services. I was going to ask a similar question but clearly that is not really of much point. I think I can say to the minister, “While I do not wish for an apology over the weekend bus services I would like to hear very soon about the improvements to the weekend bus services,” because they really were somewhere where we could see the people of Canberra said, “Yes, this is great. We have got a bus service at the weekend that we can actually understand and use and we will use it.” But it is very unfortunate that that early gain has been put back by the unreliability and then cancellation of services.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video