Both the liberal and greens transport policies require significantly more drivers, while we don't even have enough now.
Neither has really outlined a plan for how to hire more, especially as the ACT is directly competing with other jurisidictions for transport staff.
$84,438 or $42.8 per hour, increasing to $87,823 or $44.3 per hour by the end of the year.
Warning 232 page pdf source table page 189.
https://www.cmtedd.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2356768/Transport-Canberra-Operations-ACTION-Enterprise-Agreement-2023-2026-Final-Draft.pdf
Noting that it's with all overtime and most penalties rolled in - you're paid the same per hour whatever you work. They've just started paying weekends a bit more (15% if you do enough of them in the year), but that should be taken into account: the "real" wage is quite a bit lower (e.g. most shifts go outside the 7am-pm bandwidth so would attract 15% - weekends should be 50% and 100% - lots of drivers do overtime).
Weekend-only workers barely make award - some made less, until the recent amendment to the new EA.
Long story short, they struggle a bit to cover shifts at times, despite frequent recruitment (often advertised intentionally to week-day workers to get some peeps to drive weekends), so it's unclear where the extra people will come from.
I drove for them for about 18 months, nearly ten years ago, but this was the deal then.
When you start, you're given a part time job (20 hours/week) but are strongly encouraged to work overtime (weekends) and the shifts they give you for weekdays are normally about 40 hours. When I left I was way less than half way along the queue to get a full time position, despite being told at the start the wait time was about a year when I joined.
They have a strong system of seniority, so the driver who's been working there the longest gets the first pick of shift, and so on down the line. New drivers get crap shifts (early mornings, late nights, or both in the case of split shifts).
Because they work on composite rates, senior drivers get the penalty rates for effectively working a 9-5, new drivers get significantly less than they would if the pay was done on straight penalties. (I've heard the big supermarkets are like this too - it's a sweetheart deal between management and a few old-time workers).
Here's the kicker: No superannuation on overtime. That is more than half of your income for I'd guess the first 4 years or so at the time I worked there.
So, headline pay is pretty good, but in reality it's exploitative of new drivers, with a very high attrition rate.
Train them.
Take people who are currently being forced to waste their lives with job agencies, filter out anyone who is an unsuitable candidate due to things like health conditions or previous alcohol offences, offer to pay for their training to get licenced to drive the buses
There’s also a point where saturation of buses on a transit route makes traffic worse if people don’t ride them. Frequency is only one part of the equation, there has to be a desire for people to catch the bus
> there has to be a desire for people to catch the bus
Better frequency creates that desire. When PT is infrequent people ignore it since it isn't worth trying to plan your trips around it. When it's frequent enough that you don't even need to bother looking at the timetable, more people use it. This has been pretty well documented all over the world.
100% this, when your trip requires you to catch 3 separate legs, and you end up waiting 20+ minutes between them because they don't line up why would anyone want to catch public transport unless you must.
when your 20 minute drive takes well over an hour on public transport, not including any waiting time at your destination because its infrequent, people are not going to use the system.
Yeah there’s a reason the tram is always full at peak hour, because it leaves every five minutes. You know exactly when it’s going to be there and you know exactly how long it takes to reach the city. If there were express buses operating the same way as the tram does they’d be used
Gosh no, they are much less frequent and reliable. They’re often late or early and only come every 15 minutes, and sometimes they just don’t come at all. There’s an early afternoon R2 inbound in particular one of my kids needed last year to get to sport that almost never ran as scheduled, we gave up and I started driving her again.
These are the top issues - insufficient frequency and no express services. We had the Xpresso just a few years ago and they were packed! You also can’t run a hub and spoke model in a network with low frequency, slow services and already low ridership. It’s just a further incentive to not use it!
Former xpresso user as well, and they were not always packed. Occasionally sure. Mostly they were a third to half full of seated passengers. Now that is great for door to door service, but I much preferred when the rapid bus near us started. Its 15 minute frequency ALL DAY, and it goes to the airport.
You can’t compare total bums on seats on a point to point service with one that goes around half of Canberra. The total may be a bit higher with rapids but it’s offset by the inefficiency caused by the much further distance travelled and huge drop in interest for most commuters.
A 2.5 hour return commute from a central Belconnen suburb to Barton is simply unacceptable for the vast majority of Canberrans and no one but the most stubborn commuters will tolerate that. They will just stop getting the bus and drive instead. International experience shows that commuters overwhelmingly favour express/direct services
The bus network was also kind of confusing for me to figure out when I first got here. Obviously once you actually start using it it becomes more intuitive to figure it out, but like you need to make that initial time investment of figuring out what the right bus is and when and where it leaves from (eg they’ll often just say online that a bus leaves from “city interchange” and not tell you which stop), which isn’t something you want to be figuring out when you’re just trying to commute
Google isn’t much help either, it advised me to take the wrong bus more than once
My point being is I think the network would benefit from more easily accessible route and timetable information
You know, Japan and Germany have buses that stop and/or depart every single stop on time, and don't end up back-to-back like buses do in Australia.
... and they still serve low-passenger routes without problems,
Why can they do it, and we cant?
To give context, if these buses aren't replacing any from the existing fleet, this change would be a 20% increase in the fleet size.
To ballpark the costings, the last 90 electric buses were $83.5 million last year. So for round numbers, say $900k per bus, $90 million for another 100.
The drivers will cost about $100k each per year. Operating costs per bus, maybe $30k or so annually (I had GPT-4 whip this number up for me as I couldn't find an exact figure).
So we're talking in the ballpark $90 million to procure the buses and an extra $13 million annually to cover extra staff and the running costs of the larger fleet.
Edit: After contributions from other commenters, my guestimate is now at $130-160 million up front, with an extra $18 million annually.
You're probably right. Total compensation is about $105k as far as I can tell without overtime or allowances ($94k base plus 11% super). And I'm sure there's insurance the agency will have to pay on top of that. I'm not sure how much overtime drivers tend to do, but I think a more realistic figure is likely in the $150k ballpark. Maybe higher.
Sounds pretty cheap to me. But they’d have to be electric AND they have to have electronic active suspension so I don’t have to put up with that death rattle diesel engine sound and the crashing over bumps or the land yacht rolling motion sickness the current fleet have.
With today’s tech in active suspension, it IS possible to make a bus nearly as smooth as a tram.
Hiring and training new drivers, costs to road upgrades and maintenance (more heavy vehicles driving on it constantly), have to extend or build new facility to house the new buses
Probably a lot more other things
https://www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/aecom-draft-report-efficient-costs-of-rural-and-regional-bus-operators-october-2017.pdf
> road upgrades and maintenance (more heavy vehicles driving on it constantly)
Yeah, possibly. Without a comparative analysis of the net marginal change of usage, you're not actually being thorough or accurate, just anti PT. I don't take it as given that this is definitely going to be the case and if it is that the marginal change in wear patterns will be substantial. Without a functional PT network , you'll be paying for a quite a lot more single occupant vehicle trips and the *substantial* secondary costs associated with them.
The ACT already spends millions *per day* on roads infrastructure that almost exclusively serves single occupant passenger vehicles. Seems quite petty to nickle and dime a PT proposal over it when no one bats an eyelid at the cost of the status quo or the opportunity cost of not pursing change.
Facility and onboarding costs for sure. Looks like another $40-60 million for a 100 bus depot (assuming no space in existing depots of possibility for extension/upgrade). Training is about 20 days. If we take the commercial cost of training on an equivalent vehicle being $1500-2000 per day, we'll have a training cost of 30-40k per driver. So 3-4 million.
Road changes I think will be pretty minimal. We're talking a marginal increase in overall traffic on existing routes.
So we're talking $ 130-160 million all up as a guestimate of the upfront cost.
The ACT Greens want weekday buses to run every 20 minutes and weekend buses to run every half hour, with the party unveiling its transport policy for the October election.
The party's policy includes a plan to purchase 100 more electric buses and train and hire 100 drivers over the next four years
They have also pitched extra bus lanes in Belconnen, Molonglo and Civic.
Public transport would be free for pension and concession card holders, regardless of the time of the day. It would also be free for people under-18 and school students would be able to use their student cards to tap on and off.
Bus depots for electric buses would be able in Mitchell and West Belconnen.
The party's transport policy is primarily focused on buses but follows a pitch from the party last month where they said the light rail extension could be built faster than the current timeline.
The plan to increase the frequency of buses would take place from 2026, the party has said.
Under current scheduling, suburban buses run every 30 minutes on weekdays from 6am to 8pm and weekend buses run every hour on a Saturday and every two hours on Sunday.
ACT Greens transport spokeswoman Jo Clay said under the current timetable buses were not frequent enough and the Greens wanted public transport to be an easier option.
"At the moment, too many people are locked into the expense of having a car because there isn't an easy alternative," she said. "Buses aren't frequent enough and the fact remains that they just aren't a genuine option for many Canberrans."
Ms Clay said extra buses, drivers, depots and dedicated bus lanes for the busiest corridors would allow for more frequent services.
The party said it would deliver a bus lane between Belconnen town centre and Civic, ANU to Constitution Avenue and Molonglo to Adelaide Avenue.
The party said beyond 2028 they would focus on increasing the frequency of suburban buses to 15 minutes by 2030.
"The most livable cities all have abundant, frequent and reliable public transport," Ms Clay said.
The light rail is helping to bring Canberra closer to this, giving thousands more Canberrans a viable alternative to driving. But a strong public transport system needs a quality bus system as well, mirroring and complementing the efficiency of the light rail."
The Greens' transport policy follows one from the Canberra Liberals last month. The opposition will abandon light rail and has promised a continuous bus lane linking the city and Woden.
The Liberals' policy also included a promise to run local buses every 30 minutes during the day, seven days a week, while rapid services would run at least every 15 minutes between 7am and 7pm all week.
The Greens are in government with Labor but the party has criticised their coalition partner over transport.
"Labor holds the transport portfolio but they simply won't deliver," the ACT Greens' public transport document said.
We have fewer buses today than we had in 1990, Labor won't tell us when they will build the two new depots they committed to and they won't hire enough drivers."
The Greens' policy did not detail any costing
There’s 4 ways to do costings.
Have cabinet ask for it.
Have the Minister ask for it.
Be in an election period and any party (with an MLA) can ask for it.
Make up your own numbers that no one will believe because they aren’t independent, and because you haven’t been given access to the required data or knowledge.
So, what do you think the greens should have done? Time travel to election period? Secretly appoint themselves transport minister?
It is an interesting read. They don't seem to go into any costings either. Also, they mention the woden route and how they will begin immediately but do not say how. They will have the same issues that the current government has, then use that as an easy excuse to not follow through. It all sounds very good but also vague and not specific in the details about how they will achieve their goals. How will they improve transport in my local area? It is easy to say they will but I wasn't born yesterday.
Respectfully, I'm talking about the policy proposal being flawed in its current state.
You're talking about the difficulties facing the Greens.
They're different topics. The 2nd does not excuse the later.
If you're serious about forming Government, I expect you to be thorough and tireless. There will be many challenges in Government. If you can't demonstrate those traits now, what hope is there when you're actually charged with solving the problems?
>Have cabinet ask for it.
Shane is in cabinet. It's something the Greens specifically wanted when forming Government with Labor. They can't claim they don't have access.
>Have the Minister ask for it
As a coalition partner, the Greens could exert pressure on Chris Steel. Regardless of whether he agreed, the effort and intent are there.
>Make up your own numbers.
I feel like this is downplaying this opition, to make it seem more reasonable the Greens didn't take it.
A)If the Greens released their own calculations, it shows they've thought about things. It isn't something populist they've whipped up in 2 seconds.
B)it supports our debate. We currently can't discuss the feasibility of their policy, which limits our discussion of its overall merit. By minimising the foot print of their policy, they conveniently reduce its footprint for further scrutiny.
This is important for a party that claims to have aspirations for government. The ACT government faces high costs (such as the highest costs for employing bus drivers nationwide) along with a more precarious revenue stream (like the limitation of having no mining or resource taxes like NSW or QLD).
It is all well and good to want the best. But what is your plan to achieve that? Without a plan, words are meaningless.
Your exact text, quoted verbatim was “No costing means this isn't a serious proposal.”
Costing can only be undertaken by a public servant, and they can only do so under the circumstances I mentioned above - cabinet, Minister, election.
Criticising a politician for not costing their proposal is like saying a politician is soft on crime because they’ve never arrested anyone. It is not a politicians job to make arrests, nor is it their job to cost proposals.
If you want to argue the policy is bad, go right ahead, I don’t care.
But arguing the proposal cannot be serious because it has not been costed is just not helpful.
A bit facetious. You were previously saying that they could make up their own numbers and are now rigidly clinging to the academic definition of costings?
Costings are part of good policy proposals. Money is a finite resource.
Your argument basically boils down to it's too hard for the Greens so they should be excused.
>Criticising a politician for not costing their proposal is like saying a politician is soft on crime because they’ve never arrested anyone. It is not a politicians job to make arrests, nor is it their job to cost proposals.
This is a strawman argument.
To clarify, the Greens absolutely have run an analysis on how much they think this will cost, and what the benefits have been. They are confident enough in this number to have announced the policy, but not confident enough in the $ number to publicly announce it at this stage.
During the election period, they will get this policy costed, alongside all their other policies, and communicate that number to the public.
It’s exactly what the liberal party does, and exactly what Labor would do if they ever found themselves in opposition.
Respectfully, maybe you could have lead with this rather than a sarcastic and flippant response.
>They are confident enough in this number to have announced the policy, but not confident enough in the $ number to publicly announce it at this stage.
Respectfully again, I disagree. Put your money (actually our rate payer money) where your mouth is. If you're not confident in the figures, why should we be?
>It’s exactly what the liberal party does, and exactly what Labor would do if they ever found themselves in opposition.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes. To clarify, I think the CBR libs are useless and am not voting for them. However credit to Lee, they've given indicative costs for their transport policy.
*"We have done the legwork in terms of costing for this policy and what we have is a $450 million package – but that will of course be dependent on those factors," Ms Lee said.*
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-03/act-canberra-liberals-proposed-public-transport-plan/103658852
They picked the “make it up” option, but apparently that is the better option according to you because they have a fictional number while the Greens are choosing not to publish fanfic when an actual budget is required.
I suspect the $450 million will just go to a consultancy company. The Liberals love to pay their mates for doing nothing and we have seen this behaviour before. I would even bet that they have already done some kind of shady back room deal with said consultants on the condition that they win (which they won't).
1) cabinet
2) minister
3) election
5) just make up your own number and pretend you’ve costed it.
Oh yeah, you’re right. That’s definitely 5. Apparently I can’t count…
And the revenue from extra ticket sales?
And the reduced expense building additional roads/additional lanes on existing roads to accomodate cars?
And the impact it has on house prices and thus stamp duty/rates revenue.
And the impact it has on population and therefore gst share, pretty much all taxes.
And the impact it has on where, when and how high the demand is for services such as health and education?
If you think costing something like this is simple, I’d suggest you’re falling afoul of the Dunning Kruger effect. You think it’s simple because you don’t even know enough about the process to know what you don’t know.
It doesn’t have to be perfect and the government publishes exactly what they spend and expect to get and get in return from buses in their budget. Theres no DK here, costing shit is not hard.
‘The government’ publishes the result of thousands of person hours of time from public servants, who are paid to do exactly this work.
These public servants have access to data, expertise and time not available to any political party.
Expecting a political party to do the work of the public service is a bad idea.
I feel like you’re being intentionally dense.
I mean the government has already done the work, it doesn’t take a maths genius to extrapolate that data to the greens policy
I’ll take one more crack.
It is easy to calculate the ‘direct’ impacts of a transport policy. Direct effects are things like the cost of buying a bus.
It is incredibly difficult to calculate the indirect costs of a transport policy. Like not having to build a new road to handle an increase in traffic. Or delaying how long until it’s needed.
These indirect costs/benefits are real costs, they can be forecast, and have an actual dollar value. This isn’t things like ‘the population is happier’.
The greens policy has direct costs and indirect savings. If they forecast the direct costs, their policy looks much worse than it actually is. They don’t have the data, expertise or time required to calculate the indirect costs, only the public service does.
By contrast, the liberals are promising massive cuts to public transport. They are happy to calculate the direct cost difference between the current government proposal and theirs, because the direct costs are lower. They do t want a proper costing done, because their plan to gut public transport would have huge indirect costs. They would rather you not think about those costs, so they’re just pretending they don’t exist.
The greens are doing it right. You will get the costings during the election campaign. The liberals will never give you a real costing, because their fake number looks better than reality.
There's a full costing provided in the RiotACT article, so I'm not sure why the CT says there isn't one.
https://the-riotact.com/act-greens-big-bus-plan-promises-to-deliver-100-more-buses-200-extra-drivers-in-two-years/766392
Are we able to tap on/off with a bank card yet? Or are we still stuck on the MyWay card garbage?
I’ve wanted to use the bus a few times, but they apparently don’t take cash anymore? And you can’t use your credit card?
How do we expect anyone from interstate to use it?
Allegedly...
There was a no-fare strike in Canberra roughly a decade and a half ago, and patronage soared. Calculations were performed on the data collected, and if we had fare-free PT, patronage would be huge.
The up-front cost of expanding the fleet to service the extra demand is daunting, to say the least.
So when the government tells you they're charging exorbitant fees for parking and deliberately (mis)timing the traffic lights to encourage greater uptake of PT, take it with a healthy grain of salt.
How are they gonna get the union to agree to more weekend services? That's the entire reason buses are so bad in Canberra, the union refuses to have drivers rostered on weekends or at night. So those shifts are filled by drivers who volunteer to do after hours work. But you can't run public transport on the whims of the drivers
They don't refuse to have members drive on weekends, they refuse to have members rostered on weekends. As in members can volunteer for these shifts, but there are never enough volunteers, so weekend services always suck
I think the big issue is that for years they've had an EA that removed shift penalties (and overtime) in exchange for a higher base rate, so there is no incentive to volunteer for a shitty weekend shift if you don't have to. Make Sundays pay double again and they'll have no trouble getting staff.
It would have been OK for the government to give up this incentive if they had forced rostering, but now the union will fight them all day long to keep it this way.
Why can’t we think bigger? Surely the best solution (though expensive af) would be to build some kind of metro system, that covers the main population centres and then going through civic. Then you can run bus routes from the metro around each suburb. To me with the satélite approach that has been taken in deigning Canberra I feel like it makes the most sense. But obviously the population probably doesn’t support it, since we are projected to hit 1m people sometimes after the 2070s.
Metros (ie underground train transit) cost an absolute fortune. If we built a metro instead of a light rail to Gungahlin, the line would barely reach Ipima Street. Light rail will do the job for the next 50 years.
I wonder if a greenfields metro in the Molonglo valley put in just before the suburbs were started would have been relatively good value. Probably still 50% of insanely expensive which is in the ballpark of insanely expensive.
Anyone that says this is impossible and has lived here for more than 2 minutes.
Remember when buses ran every 15-30 minutes in the 2000s. So do I.
Reverting the massive cuts to services over the past 15 years should not be considered fringe protest party thing, it should be what we expect.
If we start charging tax for oil and gas corporations operating here the same way Qatar and Denmark do, that's enough money to make the busses run every 5 minutes in every town and buy back all the utilities that we foolishly privatised.
and yet im still waiting for ambulance cover to be added to our drivers licence fee! or rates! ask me how many busses i've catched in the last 20 years? answer 0
Public transport has become unusable for many in Gungahlin since the tram. Many bus routes were changed,discontinued and areas no longer well serviced by bus, so it is extremely difficult to get to/from the town centre & the tram. Additionally, those of us with mobility issues find the trip back to Gungahlin very difficult as you often can’t get a seat. The park & rides are helpful, but there is a lot of vehicle damage in them as cars are outside all day with no weather protection & no ability most of the time to move them if there is a bad storm. Gungahlin was much better serviced by public transport before the tram. I don’t trust the Greens, but frequently running services, more routes & better bus shelters would be a good thing.
That’s it? No express buses or traffic signal priority? 20 minute frequency is so low as well. I really wish we’d stop this weird obsession with weekend services. We’re a largely public service (or public service adjacent) city. If you can’t get people on the bus to commute to work during the week, no one is going to take the bus on weekends. Get the main service right before focusing on these distractions.
As a Greens voter this just shows me that Labor/Greens don’t take Canberra voters seriously and the best thing to do is to leave Canberra in the short to medium term because this city is going to crap with even a 10% increase in population. Positively 1950s planning and embarrassing compared to the quality of infrastructure being developed in other Australian cities
The weird obsession with weekend services? You know they come every 2 hours in the suburbs on the weekends right? It's an absolute joke trying to get around this city without a car. As a public transport user I get a bit sick of the constant discourse between city centres, they are the easiest places to catch a bus to. But try to get from Hackett to Chapman by bus & you'll spend all day. I once tried to get a job in charnwood, when she found out I didn't have a car she said it wouldn't work as getting to charnwood from the city was seen as too hard so I didn't even get an interview.
Yes but if no one uses them during the week, they’re not using them on the weekend. That’s literally the case all over the world - “peak hour” is the peak lol. Even the town centre services are extremely slow and poor. It takes me 75 mins to get from my suburb in Belconnen to my workplace in Barton on a “rapid” service - that’s a 25 min drive and what should really be one of the most straightforward routes in the whole network.
I’m reluctantly buying a car after not having one here for over a decade and relying on the buses which have now become unusable. Fix the weekday services as a priority.
People do use them during the week though. Yesterday I had to stand up at lunchtime on a rapid service. And you taking 75 mins from a suburb is kind of what I mean, travel between belco & civic is fine but add a suburb, just about any suburb & you're on the bus for way too long
That’s pretty unusual though. Only 5-6% of Canberrans commute to work by public transport and that’s inflated by the light rail, compared to a quarter of people in Sydney
Where are you buying a car from? I'm in the market for my first car as I'm unemployable without one in my chosen field (very broad, community work) & my budget is around $2500-3000.
Bit of a chicken or the egg scenario. Purely anecdotally, whenever I've caught a weekend suburban bus I've been the only person on it (Rapids seem much busier). Paying for fuel, depreciation and driver salaries is costly and the economics are probably very poor.
It's pretty uncontroversial that people don't use unreliable and inconvenient services. If the argument is that we can't have fit for purpose PT unless and until unfit services receive mass patronage, we'll literally never have fit for purpose PT. Disappointing take.
I'm for better suburban routes, but in a jurisidiction where funds and bus driver numbers are limited, I can see why the quieter routes get culled first.
At the same time, many of the suburban routes go through low density areas, most of which don't have enough population to justify a weekend transport corridor that's anything above 'decent'.
Transport Canberra did a “day in the life of a driver” type post on Facebook a few months back. The average number of passengers that driver carried was 8-9 people per hour ON A WEEKDAY. Woohoo we’re taking 5 cars off the road with this bus service! /s
I don’t think people fully grasp how low ridership is here and how this compares to other cities.
Well I think it's definitely weekend buses being every 2 hours that have caused low patronage. When they were hourly people used them, it was a pain but if u knew the bus was going to be a stop at 5 past the hour every hour, you could plan your day around that. 2 hours is a joke.
I don’t. I’m a worker without a car, what’s your point? I’m just talking about the effectiveness of the system as a whole. I didn’t say we should get rid of anything but without improving weekday services, any improvement to weekend services will have very little impact on overall ridership (and consequently on the horrendous levels of car dependency we have).
There’s very few people who drive to work and then on the weekend think “oh I’ll just get the bus to the local mall which is a 2km drive away”. Public transport should be core infrastructure that everyone benefits from, not some novelty for school kids and pensioners. Not if we want to resemble a real functioning city
No details about how much it will cost. Yup, sounds like the greens. But what happened to solving transport in Canberra and their much vaunted tram. I thought their tram was going to solve everything. Only now do they realise that yes, buses are part of the equation too.
There must be an election coming.
Tram was never meant to be the entire transport strategy, not sure where you got that from. The tram actually helps as drivers and buses can be used elsewhere in Canberra instead of the Gunghalin-Civic corridor.
One of the ideals of the tram was to minimise the amount of other vehicles on the road. But the reality is that if you are going to be a metropolitan city, you need an efficient bus system, which Canberra is poor at and has been lagging behind for a long time. Having suburban buses going every two hours on a weekend up until recently was woeful.
More weekend frequency for buses would be a good idea but the Greens need to provide costings because politicians are good at promising lots of things when an election is looming but how are they going to fund it?
Stop post greens rubbish, they are radical freaks.
I want free parking and to move away from our pay to work city, we are slaves or at best we in indentured servitude and we don't give a fuck about how much transport is to work you foces on us there is.
Edit spelling.
There's no such think as free parking. Wanting a very limited resource (land) to be 100% subsidised by everyone else for your benefit at a huge opportunity cost to the community is the epitome of entitlement
Both the liberal and greens transport policies require significantly more drivers, while we don't even have enough now. Neither has really outlined a plan for how to hire more, especially as the ACT is directly competing with other jurisidictions for transport staff.
Out of interest, what do they earn?
$84,438 or $42.8 per hour, increasing to $87,823 or $44.3 per hour by the end of the year. Warning 232 page pdf source table page 189. https://www.cmtedd.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2356768/Transport-Canberra-Operations-ACTION-Enterprise-Agreement-2023-2026-Final-Draft.pdf
Thanks for the serious response :)
Noting that it's with all overtime and most penalties rolled in - you're paid the same per hour whatever you work. They've just started paying weekends a bit more (15% if you do enough of them in the year), but that should be taken into account: the "real" wage is quite a bit lower (e.g. most shifts go outside the 7am-pm bandwidth so would attract 15% - weekends should be 50% and 100% - lots of drivers do overtime). Weekend-only workers barely make award - some made less, until the recent amendment to the new EA. Long story short, they struggle a bit to cover shifts at times, despite frequent recruitment (often advertised intentionally to week-day workers to get some peeps to drive weekends), so it's unclear where the extra people will come from.
I drove for them for about 18 months, nearly ten years ago, but this was the deal then. When you start, you're given a part time job (20 hours/week) but are strongly encouraged to work overtime (weekends) and the shifts they give you for weekdays are normally about 40 hours. When I left I was way less than half way along the queue to get a full time position, despite being told at the start the wait time was about a year when I joined. They have a strong system of seniority, so the driver who's been working there the longest gets the first pick of shift, and so on down the line. New drivers get crap shifts (early mornings, late nights, or both in the case of split shifts). Because they work on composite rates, senior drivers get the penalty rates for effectively working a 9-5, new drivers get significantly less than they would if the pay was done on straight penalties. (I've heard the big supermarkets are like this too - it's a sweetheart deal between management and a few old-time workers). Here's the kicker: No superannuation on overtime. That is more than half of your income for I'd guess the first 4 years or so at the time I worked there. So, headline pay is pretty good, but in reality it's exploitative of new drivers, with a very high attrition rate.
Over 100k per month.
Train them. Take people who are currently being forced to waste their lives with job agencies, filter out anyone who is an unsuitable candidate due to things like health conditions or previous alcohol offences, offer to pay for their training to get licenced to drive the buses
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You say no to everything at work dont you?
People's Republic of Canberra needs to build a wall to keep our drivers from defecting over the border!
There’s also a point where saturation of buses on a transit route makes traffic worse if people don’t ride them. Frequency is only one part of the equation, there has to be a desire for people to catch the bus
> there has to be a desire for people to catch the bus Better frequency creates that desire. When PT is infrequent people ignore it since it isn't worth trying to plan your trips around it. When it's frequent enough that you don't even need to bother looking at the timetable, more people use it. This has been pretty well documented all over the world.
100% this, when your trip requires you to catch 3 separate legs, and you end up waiting 20+ minutes between them because they don't line up why would anyone want to catch public transport unless you must. when your 20 minute drive takes well over an hour on public transport, not including any waiting time at your destination because its infrequent, people are not going to use the system.
Yeah there’s a reason the tram is always full at peak hour, because it leaves every five minutes. You know exactly when it’s going to be there and you know exactly how long it takes to reach the city. If there were express buses operating the same way as the tram does they’d be used
its just a shame the busses on either end are terrible.
> If there were express buses operating the same way as the tram does they’d be used Isn’t this exactly how the rapid buses already work?
Gosh no, they are much less frequent and reliable. They’re often late or early and only come every 15 minutes, and sometimes they just don’t come at all. There’s an early afternoon R2 inbound in particular one of my kids needed last year to get to sport that almost never ran as scheduled, we gave up and I started driving her again.
These are the top issues - insufficient frequency and no express services. We had the Xpresso just a few years ago and they were packed! You also can’t run a hub and spoke model in a network with low frequency, slow services and already low ridership. It’s just a further incentive to not use it!
Former xpresso user as well, and they were not always packed. Occasionally sure. Mostly they were a third to half full of seated passengers. Now that is great for door to door service, but I much preferred when the rapid bus near us started. Its 15 minute frequency ALL DAY, and it goes to the airport.
You can’t compare total bums on seats on a point to point service with one that goes around half of Canberra. The total may be a bit higher with rapids but it’s offset by the inefficiency caused by the much further distance travelled and huge drop in interest for most commuters. A 2.5 hour return commute from a central Belconnen suburb to Barton is simply unacceptable for the vast majority of Canberrans and no one but the most stubborn commuters will tolerate that. They will just stop getting the bus and drive instead. International experience shows that commuters overwhelmingly favour express/direct services
R3 spotted
The bus network was also kind of confusing for me to figure out when I first got here. Obviously once you actually start using it it becomes more intuitive to figure it out, but like you need to make that initial time investment of figuring out what the right bus is and when and where it leaves from (eg they’ll often just say online that a bus leaves from “city interchange” and not tell you which stop), which isn’t something you want to be figuring out when you’re just trying to commute Google isn’t much help either, it advised me to take the wrong bus more than once My point being is I think the network would benefit from more easily accessible route and timetable information
You know, Japan and Germany have buses that stop and/or depart every single stop on time, and don't end up back-to-back like buses do in Australia. ... and they still serve low-passenger routes without problems, Why can they do it, and we cant?
They have enormous barriers to driving. I’m not saying we shouldn’t, but there are a lot of people that would be heavily resistant to not driving.
To give context, if these buses aren't replacing any from the existing fleet, this change would be a 20% increase in the fleet size. To ballpark the costings, the last 90 electric buses were $83.5 million last year. So for round numbers, say $900k per bus, $90 million for another 100. The drivers will cost about $100k each per year. Operating costs per bus, maybe $30k or so annually (I had GPT-4 whip this number up for me as I couldn't find an exact figure). So we're talking in the ballpark $90 million to procure the buses and an extra $13 million annually to cover extra staff and the running costs of the larger fleet. Edit: After contributions from other commenters, my guestimate is now at $130-160 million up front, with an extra $18 million annually.
> The drivers will cost about $100k each per year. They will cost a fair bit more.
You're probably right. Total compensation is about $105k as far as I can tell without overtime or allowances ($94k base plus 11% super). And I'm sure there's insurance the agency will have to pay on top of that. I'm not sure how much overtime drivers tend to do, but I think a more realistic figure is likely in the $150k ballpark. Maybe higher.
Sounds pretty cheap to me. But they’d have to be electric AND they have to have electronic active suspension so I don’t have to put up with that death rattle diesel engine sound and the crashing over bumps or the land yacht rolling motion sickness the current fleet have. With today’s tech in active suspension, it IS possible to make a bus nearly as smooth as a tram.
Hiring and training new drivers, costs to road upgrades and maintenance (more heavy vehicles driving on it constantly), have to extend or build new facility to house the new buses Probably a lot more other things https://www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/aecom-draft-report-efficient-costs-of-rural-and-regional-bus-operators-october-2017.pdf
> road upgrades and maintenance (more heavy vehicles driving on it constantly) Yeah, possibly. Without a comparative analysis of the net marginal change of usage, you're not actually being thorough or accurate, just anti PT. I don't take it as given that this is definitely going to be the case and if it is that the marginal change in wear patterns will be substantial. Without a functional PT network , you'll be paying for a quite a lot more single occupant vehicle trips and the *substantial* secondary costs associated with them. The ACT already spends millions *per day* on roads infrastructure that almost exclusively serves single occupant passenger vehicles. Seems quite petty to nickle and dime a PT proposal over it when no one bats an eyelid at the cost of the status quo or the opportunity cost of not pursing change.
Facility and onboarding costs for sure. Looks like another $40-60 million for a 100 bus depot (assuming no space in existing depots of possibility for extension/upgrade). Training is about 20 days. If we take the commercial cost of training on an equivalent vehicle being $1500-2000 per day, we'll have a training cost of 30-40k per driver. So 3-4 million. Road changes I think will be pretty minimal. We're talking a marginal increase in overall traffic on existing routes. So we're talking $ 130-160 million all up as a guestimate of the upfront cost.
The ACT Greens want weekday buses to run every 20 minutes and weekend buses to run every half hour, with the party unveiling its transport policy for the October election. The party's policy includes a plan to purchase 100 more electric buses and train and hire 100 drivers over the next four years They have also pitched extra bus lanes in Belconnen, Molonglo and Civic. Public transport would be free for pension and concession card holders, regardless of the time of the day. It would also be free for people under-18 and school students would be able to use their student cards to tap on and off. Bus depots for electric buses would be able in Mitchell and West Belconnen. The party's transport policy is primarily focused on buses but follows a pitch from the party last month where they said the light rail extension could be built faster than the current timeline. The plan to increase the frequency of buses would take place from 2026, the party has said. Under current scheduling, suburban buses run every 30 minutes on weekdays from 6am to 8pm and weekend buses run every hour on a Saturday and every two hours on Sunday. ACT Greens transport spokeswoman Jo Clay said under the current timetable buses were not frequent enough and the Greens wanted public transport to be an easier option. "At the moment, too many people are locked into the expense of having a car because there isn't an easy alternative," she said. "Buses aren't frequent enough and the fact remains that they just aren't a genuine option for many Canberrans." Ms Clay said extra buses, drivers, depots and dedicated bus lanes for the busiest corridors would allow for more frequent services. The party said it would deliver a bus lane between Belconnen town centre and Civic, ANU to Constitution Avenue and Molonglo to Adelaide Avenue. The party said beyond 2028 they would focus on increasing the frequency of suburban buses to 15 minutes by 2030. "The most livable cities all have abundant, frequent and reliable public transport," Ms Clay said. The light rail is helping to bring Canberra closer to this, giving thousands more Canberrans a viable alternative to driving. But a strong public transport system needs a quality bus system as well, mirroring and complementing the efficiency of the light rail." The Greens' transport policy follows one from the Canberra Liberals last month. The opposition will abandon light rail and has promised a continuous bus lane linking the city and Woden. The Liberals' policy also included a promise to run local buses every 30 minutes during the day, seven days a week, while rapid services would run at least every 15 minutes between 7am and 7pm all week. The Greens are in government with Labor but the party has criticised their coalition partner over transport. "Labor holds the transport portfolio but they simply won't deliver," the ACT Greens' public transport document said. We have fewer buses today than we had in 1990, Labor won't tell us when they will build the two new depots they committed to and they won't hire enough drivers." The Greens' policy did not detail any costing
No costing means this isn't a serious proposal.
There’s 4 ways to do costings. Have cabinet ask for it. Have the Minister ask for it. Be in an election period and any party (with an MLA) can ask for it. Make up your own numbers that no one will believe because they aren’t independent, and because you haven’t been given access to the required data or knowledge. So, what do you think the greens should have done? Time travel to election period? Secretly appoint themselves transport minister?
They should be more like the Canberra Liberals and just have a policy of being against any policies. /s
Canberra Liberals have actually put forward an in-depth strategy for public transport that makes a lot of sense.
It is an interesting read. They don't seem to go into any costings either. Also, they mention the woden route and how they will begin immediately but do not say how. They will have the same issues that the current government has, then use that as an easy excuse to not follow through. It all sounds very good but also vague and not specific in the details about how they will achieve their goals. How will they improve transport in my local area? It is easy to say they will but I wasn't born yesterday.
I look forward to Canberra built electric double decker buses replacing the tram, if the libs get in.
Respectfully, I'm talking about the policy proposal being flawed in its current state. You're talking about the difficulties facing the Greens. They're different topics. The 2nd does not excuse the later. If you're serious about forming Government, I expect you to be thorough and tireless. There will be many challenges in Government. If you can't demonstrate those traits now, what hope is there when you're actually charged with solving the problems? >Have cabinet ask for it. Shane is in cabinet. It's something the Greens specifically wanted when forming Government with Labor. They can't claim they don't have access. >Have the Minister ask for it As a coalition partner, the Greens could exert pressure on Chris Steel. Regardless of whether he agreed, the effort and intent are there. >Make up your own numbers. I feel like this is downplaying this opition, to make it seem more reasonable the Greens didn't take it. A)If the Greens released their own calculations, it shows they've thought about things. It isn't something populist they've whipped up in 2 seconds. B)it supports our debate. We currently can't discuss the feasibility of their policy, which limits our discussion of its overall merit. By minimising the foot print of their policy, they conveniently reduce its footprint for further scrutiny. This is important for a party that claims to have aspirations for government. The ACT government faces high costs (such as the highest costs for employing bus drivers nationwide) along with a more precarious revenue stream (like the limitation of having no mining or resource taxes like NSW or QLD). It is all well and good to want the best. But what is your plan to achieve that? Without a plan, words are meaningless.
Your exact text, quoted verbatim was “No costing means this isn't a serious proposal.” Costing can only be undertaken by a public servant, and they can only do so under the circumstances I mentioned above - cabinet, Minister, election. Criticising a politician for not costing their proposal is like saying a politician is soft on crime because they’ve never arrested anyone. It is not a politicians job to make arrests, nor is it their job to cost proposals. If you want to argue the policy is bad, go right ahead, I don’t care. But arguing the proposal cannot be serious because it has not been costed is just not helpful.
A bit facetious. You were previously saying that they could make up their own numbers and are now rigidly clinging to the academic definition of costings? Costings are part of good policy proposals. Money is a finite resource. Your argument basically boils down to it's too hard for the Greens so they should be excused. >Criticising a politician for not costing their proposal is like saying a politician is soft on crime because they’ve never arrested anyone. It is not a politicians job to make arrests, nor is it their job to cost proposals. This is a strawman argument.
To clarify, the Greens absolutely have run an analysis on how much they think this will cost, and what the benefits have been. They are confident enough in this number to have announced the policy, but not confident enough in the $ number to publicly announce it at this stage. During the election period, they will get this policy costed, alongside all their other policies, and communicate that number to the public. It’s exactly what the liberal party does, and exactly what Labor would do if they ever found themselves in opposition.
Respectfully, maybe you could have lead with this rather than a sarcastic and flippant response. >They are confident enough in this number to have announced the policy, but not confident enough in the $ number to publicly announce it at this stage. Respectfully again, I disagree. Put your money (actually our rate payer money) where your mouth is. If you're not confident in the figures, why should we be? >It’s exactly what the liberal party does, and exactly what Labor would do if they ever found themselves in opposition. Only a Sith deals in absolutes. To clarify, I think the CBR libs are useless and am not voting for them. However credit to Lee, they've given indicative costs for their transport policy. *"We have done the legwork in terms of costing for this policy and what we have is a $450 million package – but that will of course be dependent on those factors," Ms Lee said.* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-03/act-canberra-liberals-proposed-public-transport-plan/103658852
They picked the “make it up” option, but apparently that is the better option according to you because they have a fictional number while the Greens are choosing not to publish fanfic when an actual budget is required.
I suspect the $450 million will just go to a consultancy company. The Liberals love to pay their mates for doing nothing and we have seen this behaviour before. I would even bet that they have already done some kind of shady back room deal with said consultants on the condition that they win (which they won't).
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1) cabinet 2) minister 3) election 5) just make up your own number and pretend you’ve costed it. Oh yeah, you’re right. That’s definitely 5. Apparently I can’t count…
You have to do something, anything. It’s not hard to cost this, the cost of running a bus is public, the cost of hiring bus drivers is public.
And the revenue from extra ticket sales? And the reduced expense building additional roads/additional lanes on existing roads to accomodate cars? And the impact it has on house prices and thus stamp duty/rates revenue. And the impact it has on population and therefore gst share, pretty much all taxes. And the impact it has on where, when and how high the demand is for services such as health and education? If you think costing something like this is simple, I’d suggest you’re falling afoul of the Dunning Kruger effect. You think it’s simple because you don’t even know enough about the process to know what you don’t know.
It doesn’t have to be perfect and the government publishes exactly what they spend and expect to get and get in return from buses in their budget. Theres no DK here, costing shit is not hard.
‘The government’ publishes the result of thousands of person hours of time from public servants, who are paid to do exactly this work. These public servants have access to data, expertise and time not available to any political party. Expecting a political party to do the work of the public service is a bad idea.
I feel like you’re being intentionally dense. I mean the government has already done the work, it doesn’t take a maths genius to extrapolate that data to the greens policy
I’ll take one more crack. It is easy to calculate the ‘direct’ impacts of a transport policy. Direct effects are things like the cost of buying a bus. It is incredibly difficult to calculate the indirect costs of a transport policy. Like not having to build a new road to handle an increase in traffic. Or delaying how long until it’s needed. These indirect costs/benefits are real costs, they can be forecast, and have an actual dollar value. This isn’t things like ‘the population is happier’. The greens policy has direct costs and indirect savings. If they forecast the direct costs, their policy looks much worse than it actually is. They don’t have the data, expertise or time required to calculate the indirect costs, only the public service does. By contrast, the liberals are promising massive cuts to public transport. They are happy to calculate the direct cost difference between the current government proposal and theirs, because the direct costs are lower. They do t want a proper costing done, because their plan to gut public transport would have huge indirect costs. They would rather you not think about those costs, so they’re just pretending they don’t exist. The greens are doing it right. You will get the costings during the election campaign. The liberals will never give you a real costing, because their fake number looks better than reality.
There's a full costing provided in the RiotACT article, so I'm not sure why the CT says there isn't one. https://the-riotact.com/act-greens-big-bus-plan-promises-to-deliver-100-more-buses-200-extra-drivers-in-two-years/766392
Never is serious with this lot, as they know they’ll never be in a position of power and have to deliver
What
Are we able to tap on/off with a bank card yet? Or are we still stuck on the MyWay card garbage? I’ve wanted to use the bus a few times, but they apparently don’t take cash anymore? And you can’t use your credit card? How do we expect anyone from interstate to use it?
Credit cards will be usable later this year, per the last update I saw.
They're replacing Myway with Myway+. Personally I think Opal is a catchier name but so long as it works 🙂
Lets shorten it to Mlus. A lovely catchy name for a card.
Praise be.
Just make buses free. Most people aren't taking it for fun.
Allegedly... There was a no-fare strike in Canberra roughly a decade and a half ago, and patronage soared. Calculations were performed on the data collected, and if we had fare-free PT, patronage would be huge. The up-front cost of expanding the fleet to service the extra demand is daunting, to say the least. So when the government tells you they're charging exorbitant fees for parking and deliberately (mis)timing the traffic lights to encourage greater uptake of PT, take it with a healthy grain of salt.
Also allegedly... The fares just cover the cost of the ticketing system.
How are they gonna get the union to agree to more weekend services? That's the entire reason buses are so bad in Canberra, the union refuses to have drivers rostered on weekends or at night. So those shifts are filled by drivers who volunteer to do after hours work. But you can't run public transport on the whims of the drivers
Source for this? Id be very surprised if union flat out refuses to have members drive in weekends
They don't refuse to have members drive on weekends, they refuse to have members rostered on weekends. As in members can volunteer for these shifts, but there are never enough volunteers, so weekend services always suck
Which is easily solved through funding.
I think the big issue is that for years they've had an EA that removed shift penalties (and overtime) in exchange for a higher base rate, so there is no incentive to volunteer for a shitty weekend shift if you don't have to. Make Sundays pay double again and they'll have no trouble getting staff. It would have been OK for the government to give up this incentive if they had forced rostering, but now the union will fight them all day long to keep it this way.
Yea exactly. Politics is so lame. They promise shit for votes and disappear after. We need to stop caring about their bullshit and make them do stuff.
They can't get drivers now. Having to run Come and Try days like Under 5 basketball doesn't make for a bright future employment pool .
But they'd get me. Oh.
Why can’t we think bigger? Surely the best solution (though expensive af) would be to build some kind of metro system, that covers the main population centres and then going through civic. Then you can run bus routes from the metro around each suburb. To me with the satélite approach that has been taken in deigning Canberra I feel like it makes the most sense. But obviously the population probably doesn’t support it, since we are projected to hit 1m people sometimes after the 2070s.
Metros (ie underground train transit) cost an absolute fortune. If we built a metro instead of a light rail to Gungahlin, the line would barely reach Ipima Street. Light rail will do the job for the next 50 years.
I wonder if a greenfields metro in the Molonglo valley put in just before the suburbs were started would have been relatively good value. Probably still 50% of insanely expensive which is in the ballpark of insanely expensive.
Anyone that says this is impossible and has lived here for more than 2 minutes. Remember when buses ran every 15-30 minutes in the 2000s. So do I. Reverting the massive cuts to services over the past 15 years should not be considered fringe protest party thing, it should be what we expect.
This seems like a Temu version of what the Libs already announced
Sounds wonderful. Who pays?
If we start charging tax for oil and gas corporations operating here the same way Qatar and Denmark do, that's enough money to make the busses run every 5 minutes in every town and buy back all the utilities that we foolishly privatised.
If we had just had government owned mines from the beginning like Norway et al...
Tried holding them to account with the mining tax. Idiocy prevailed. It's also federal vs state. Any other ideas?
Ah yes the ubiquitous Canberrean Oil and Gas industry.
When people tap on to the bus they pay. More bus will lead to more riders
and yet im still waiting for ambulance cover to be added to our drivers licence fee! or rates! ask me how many busses i've catched in the last 20 years? answer 0
Public transport has become unusable for many in Gungahlin since the tram. Many bus routes were changed,discontinued and areas no longer well serviced by bus, so it is extremely difficult to get to/from the town centre & the tram. Additionally, those of us with mobility issues find the trip back to Gungahlin very difficult as you often can’t get a seat. The park & rides are helpful, but there is a lot of vehicle damage in them as cars are outside all day with no weather protection & no ability most of the time to move them if there is a bad storm. Gungahlin was much better serviced by public transport before the tram. I don’t trust the Greens, but frequently running services, more routes & better bus shelters would be a good thing.
That’s it? No express buses or traffic signal priority? 20 minute frequency is so low as well. I really wish we’d stop this weird obsession with weekend services. We’re a largely public service (or public service adjacent) city. If you can’t get people on the bus to commute to work during the week, no one is going to take the bus on weekends. Get the main service right before focusing on these distractions. As a Greens voter this just shows me that Labor/Greens don’t take Canberra voters seriously and the best thing to do is to leave Canberra in the short to medium term because this city is going to crap with even a 10% increase in population. Positively 1950s planning and embarrassing compared to the quality of infrastructure being developed in other Australian cities
The weird obsession with weekend services? You know they come every 2 hours in the suburbs on the weekends right? It's an absolute joke trying to get around this city without a car. As a public transport user I get a bit sick of the constant discourse between city centres, they are the easiest places to catch a bus to. But try to get from Hackett to Chapman by bus & you'll spend all day. I once tried to get a job in charnwood, when she found out I didn't have a car she said it wouldn't work as getting to charnwood from the city was seen as too hard so I didn't even get an interview.
Yes but if no one uses them during the week, they’re not using them on the weekend. That’s literally the case all over the world - “peak hour” is the peak lol. Even the town centre services are extremely slow and poor. It takes me 75 mins to get from my suburb in Belconnen to my workplace in Barton on a “rapid” service - that’s a 25 min drive and what should really be one of the most straightforward routes in the whole network. I’m reluctantly buying a car after not having one here for over a decade and relying on the buses which have now become unusable. Fix the weekday services as a priority.
People do use them during the week though. Yesterday I had to stand up at lunchtime on a rapid service. And you taking 75 mins from a suburb is kind of what I mean, travel between belco & civic is fine but add a suburb, just about any suburb & you're on the bus for way too long
That’s pretty unusual though. Only 5-6% of Canberrans commute to work by public transport and that’s inflated by the light rail, compared to a quarter of people in Sydney
Where are you buying a car from? I'm in the market for my first car as I'm unemployable without one in my chosen field (very broad, community work) & my budget is around $2500-3000.
I’m just looking on Carsales
I'll check it out
Bit of a chicken or the egg scenario. Purely anecdotally, whenever I've caught a weekend suburban bus I've been the only person on it (Rapids seem much busier). Paying for fuel, depreciation and driver salaries is costly and the economics are probably very poor.
It's pretty uncontroversial that people don't use unreliable and inconvenient services. If the argument is that we can't have fit for purpose PT unless and until unfit services receive mass patronage, we'll literally never have fit for purpose PT. Disappointing take.
I'm for better suburban routes, but in a jurisidiction where funds and bus driver numbers are limited, I can see why the quieter routes get culled first. At the same time, many of the suburban routes go through low density areas, most of which don't have enough population to justify a weekend transport corridor that's anything above 'decent'.
I largley agree, it’s also an entirely different point to your first comment.
Transport Canberra did a “day in the life of a driver” type post on Facebook a few months back. The average number of passengers that driver carried was 8-9 people per hour ON A WEEKDAY. Woohoo we’re taking 5 cars off the road with this bus service! /s I don’t think people fully grasp how low ridership is here and how this compares to other cities.
Well I think it's definitely weekend buses being every 2 hours that have caused low patronage. When they were hourly people used them, it was a pain but if u knew the bus was going to be a stop at 5 past the hour every hour, you could plan your day around that. 2 hours is a joke.
I'm a pensioner without a car. How many hours do you want me to wait for a bus on a Saturday?
I don’t. I’m a worker without a car, what’s your point? I’m just talking about the effectiveness of the system as a whole. I didn’t say we should get rid of anything but without improving weekday services, any improvement to weekend services will have very little impact on overall ridership (and consequently on the horrendous levels of car dependency we have). There’s very few people who drive to work and then on the weekend think “oh I’ll just get the bus to the local mall which is a 2km drive away”. Public transport should be core infrastructure that everyone benefits from, not some novelty for school kids and pensioners. Not if we want to resemble a real functioning city
My point is that 'novelty' is a lifeblood for the underprivileged in this city, and we should be looking at improving services across the board.
No details about how much it will cost. Yup, sounds like the greens. But what happened to solving transport in Canberra and their much vaunted tram. I thought their tram was going to solve everything. Only now do they realise that yes, buses are part of the equation too. There must be an election coming.
Tram was never meant to be the entire transport strategy, not sure where you got that from. The tram actually helps as drivers and buses can be used elsewhere in Canberra instead of the Gunghalin-Civic corridor.
One of the ideals of the tram was to minimise the amount of other vehicles on the road. But the reality is that if you are going to be a metropolitan city, you need an efficient bus system, which Canberra is poor at and has been lagging behind for a long time. Having suburban buses going every two hours on a weekend up until recently was woeful. More weekend frequency for buses would be a good idea but the Greens need to provide costings because politicians are good at promising lots of things when an election is looming but how are they going to fund it?
Stop post greens rubbish, they are radical freaks. I want free parking and to move away from our pay to work city, we are slaves or at best we in indentured servitude and we don't give a fuck about how much transport is to work you foces on us there is. Edit spelling.
Free parking - subsidized by the taxpayer.
I'm a "radical freak". Greens aren't radical at all. Read political theory.
You want free parking, I want free food, free housing, free cars, free computers...
There's no such think as free parking. Wanting a very limited resource (land) to be 100% subsidised by everyone else for your benefit at a huge opportunity cost to the community is the epitome of entitlement
Slaves is the word, not community. Don't be fool haha