Speeches in the ACT Legislative Assembly
20 November 2009
Speech 1.
MR COE (Ginninderra): This week a $1 million trial of Redex begins. Redex offers services between Gungahlin and Kingston, via the city, at a 15-minute frequency between 7 am and 7 pm. It has been touted by the government to be the future of public transport in Canberra and will be evaluated in six months time.
Redex means “rapid express direct”—the implication, of course, being that these buses are somewhat rapid, they are express, and they are more direct relative to other ACTION buses. However, this title is clearly only glossy rhetoric, covering up a service that is abysmally planned and does not deliver all the benefits to commuters that it claims to.
We would all, of course, remember the budget announcement of these rapid transit services that would link west Belconnen with Belconnen, the city, Barton, Woden and Tuggeranong. There was also the other link that would provide a rapid option from Gungahlin to the city, Barton, Woden and Tuggeranong. That has been scaled back to one service between Gungahlin, the city and Kingston, which is very unfortunate. What does this government have against the people of west Belconnen? Who in the government or the Greens is advocating for west Belconnen? I did not hear Ms Porter or Ms Hunter criticise the minister’s decision to wind back services to west Belconnen. Surely, if they were effective, genuine and objective local members, they would have been speaking out in favour of better bus services for Belconnen.
Whilst I welcome an investment in services in Gungahlin and in other parts of Canberra, as I will shortly describe, there are no time savings, or negligible time savings, and the majority of commuters from Gungahlin will not benefit from this service.
It is easy to understand why when you look at the route map: the Redex buses travel down the exact same route as the existing routes 51, 52 and 59 services from Gungahlin to the city during peak hour, and the existing route 5 service during off-peak hours. They have to stop at the same traffic lights and contend with the same traffic that the current buses do.
During off-peak hours, routes 51, 52 and 59 provide links between Belconnen and the Gungahlin town centre through Nicholls, Ngunnawal, Amaroo and Forde and on to the city. During peak hours, there are 50 services a day which extend the service from Belconnen, Gungahlin suburbs, the Gungahlin Marketplace and on to the city interchange. Of those 50 services, 22 are in the morning and 28 are in the evening. So it is possible for someone in Nicholls, Ngunnawal, Amaroo or Forde to get a bus in the morning and go directly to the city. In the afternoon, they can get a bus from the city and go directly to their suburb. For one of these passengers to use the Redex, they would have to get off the bus which is city bound, wait at the Gungahlin Marketplace and hop onto a Redex service which is going on the same road as the bus they just got off. It seems absurd to me that anyone would actually use this service. An analysis of the timetable shows that, for 92 per cent of these services for Gungahlin residents in Nicholls, Ngunnawal, Forde and Amaroo on a route 51, 52 or 59 service, it is better to stay on that bus rather than change to the Redex service at the Gungahlin Marketplace. Changing buses would result in extra travel time, not less.
Yesterday’s Canberra Times on page 5 talks about the Redex service which “gets the thumbs up”. It talks about a commuter living in Ngunnawal who got the 8 am Redex service. An analysis of the timetables will tell you that if that person got on a route bus from Ngunnawal, he was better off staying on the 51 or 52 and going straight into the city than he was to get on a Redex service at the Gungahlin Marketplace. Why? Because before 9 am it is impossible to arrive in the city faster from Nicholls, Ngunnawal, Forde or Amaroo using a Redex connection than it would be if he used the one route bus.
Some people may say that the benefits are mainly for people in off-peak times. If so, why is there already a route 5 service which has been running on the same roads as the Redex, only during off-peak, for many months? This service is all about spin. It is not about delivering a better bus system or better services for Gungahlin. It is about ticking the box next to one of the lines in the Greens-Labor agreement. Unfortunately, the desperate and ideological Greens will not stand up for what is fundamentally not the best way to spend $1 million on ACTION buses.
This brings me to my next point: if commuters from Gungahlin suburbs are to use the Redex service efficiently, they have to get to the Gungahlin Marketplace. As I have already discussed, changing to Redex from Gungahlin suburban routes extends rather than shortens the commuters’ trips. So the only other option is to use a park and ride service. At the moment, because there are no park and ride facilities at the Gungahlin town centre, commuters are forced to park in private parking spaces at the Gungahlin shops. This means that traders in the Gungahlin town centre are disadvantaged because customers are discouraged from parking and shopping at Gungahlin. When traders start to complain that their businesses are being hurt by people parking in the Marketplace or “the G” undercover car parks, hopping on a bus and not shopping in Gungahlin, it will be because of Labor’s and Green’s lack of vision and lack of planning. If these shopping centres have to close their car park doors until after peak hour, have to put up boom gates or start charging for parking, it may well be because of this government’s poor decision making regarding park and ride facilities. The Canberra Liberals have a better plan for Gungahlin. The Canberra Liberals would invest in free parking to expand areas for park and ride commuters. It would also include cycle and ride facilities so that commuters could ride to Gungahlin and utilise public transport from there. Lockers would be available to protect bicycles from vandalism and theft, and would also provide storage for bicycle accessories such as helmets, pumps and clothing.
A safe location in Gungahlin, close to lighting, buses and local shops, and in consultation with the community, would be chosen. It would also be based on a site
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.
As is widely known, there are already stresses and a lack of resources across the ACT bus network. Rather than fixing problems with the network, precious resources have been applied to this experiment that is set to fail. This dead running will tally up to considerable amounts of fuel and emissions.
It seems, just like the ACT Labor Party on this matter, all that the ACT Greens are interested in are positive headlines. As part of the agreement, the Labor Party and the Greens signed up to the following:
2.4 Adopting a goal of guaranteed bus frequency of 30 minutes. The first stage of the proposal, considering time periods and appropriate locations should begin implementation by the middle of 2009.
It is now late 2009, and for the Greens to claim Redex is part of achieving the terms of their agreement is, indeed, very shallow. It shows that the Greens are not willing to be a third force in ACT politics and are nothing more than an appendage of the Labor Party in this place.
The Labor Party-Greens agreement also shows they are not even interested in Gungahlin commuters. There is no commitment to park and ride or bike and ride in Gungahlin as part of the agreement. How can the Greens claim to be a party of the environment and integrated transport if they cannot even make the simple commitments required for Gungahlin commuters? In a press release late last week, the Greens transport spokesman, Amanda Bresnan, said:
“If the REDEX trial is a success, we would like to see the Government expand the REDEX service to include another route in the 2010-11 Budget, either from Belconnen or Tuggeranong.”
As I have pointed out already, these services were announced as part of this budget but have already been abandoned. The Greens have nothing more than a shallow and glib commitment to the transport needs of the ACT.
The Canberra Liberals are the only party that offer practical solutions to the transport challenge and a move away from the stale and outdated approach of the other parties in this place.
Speech 2.
MR COE (Ginninderra): There have been a few things said in this debate that are really quite inaccurate and not sticking up for the good people of Gungahlin. The people on the crossbench, the Greens, may not actually know where Gungahlin is, but it is that bit to the north of Lyneham or to the north-west of Watson, north of the inner north. It is where 40,000 live and 40,000 people struggle to get the bus to the city.
It is all very well to bolster the services between the Gungahlin Marketplace and the city. But how do you get to the Gungahlin Marketplace? If you look at the times, each morning there are 22 services which run from Gungahlin suburbs, through the Gungahlin Marketplace and on to the city. If you actually look at these times and you compare them to the Redex, you get some pretty interesting statistics. For instance, if I was to get a bus at 6.45 am—up nice and early—I hop on the bus and I arrive at the Gungahlin Marketplace at three minutes past seven. If I was to go into the city on the same bus, I would arrive at 7.25 am. So I leave at 6.45, arrive at Gungahlin at 7.03, go straight on through and I am there at 7.25 am. If I was to use the Redex, I would have to get off that bus, which is using the same road as the Redex. So I would get on the bus at 6.45 in Nicholls, I would get off at 7.03 am, I would wait for 13 minutes at the Gungahlin Marketplace, then get on the Redex, which is going on the same route as my other bus, and I would arrive at 7.46 am. It would be 21 minutes slower.
That might be an anomaly, so let us look at the next time, 6.59 am. I get on the No 52 at Nicholls. I arrive at the Gungahlin Marketplace at 7.13 am. I would keep on going through and I am there at 7.35 am. If I had done something differently, I could have got off the route service, which is going to the city, waited at the Gungahlin Marketplace and then hopped on a Redex. How much slower would I be? Eleven minutes slower that way.
If you look at all these times, this is how much slower they are: 21 minutes slower, 13 minutes slower, 11 minutes slower, 20 minutes slower, 11 minutes slower, five minutes slower, five minutes slower, five minutes slower, nine minutes slower, three minutes slower, nine minutes slower, four minutes slower, five minutes slower. Not until 8.29 am is it possible to go from a Gungahlin suburb, through the Gungahlin Marketplace and on to the city on a Redex in a faster time. And how much faster is it? It is two minutes faster. So we are spending a million dollars to get a service which is two minutes faster and involves a connection.
Of the 50 comparisons I have done, of the 50 services each day between the city and Gungahlin suburbs, 46 of them are faster on existing services. On only four of them are you actually faster on a Redex. We are spending a million dollars on this trial for a service which is going to be slower for 92 per cent of the time. If the 40,000 constituents in Gungahlin who normally get the 51, 52 or 59 bus were to use the Redex service, they would be slower 92 per cent of the time than if they stayed on their normal route bus. These are facts. The only way that somebody would actually make the most of the Redex service would be if they got a lift to, got dropped off at or drove to the Gungahlin Marketplace.
So it seems to me that we have got a park and ride but with no park, because the only parking spaces that are available in Gungahlin at the moment are pretty much in the G shopping centre or in the Marketplace shopping centre. What is going to happen if you want to get in to work for 9 o’clock? Say you want to get on the Redex at 8.01 am, which gets you in at 8.35 am. You are going to drive in to the Marketplace and you will get a nice spot, under cover, right by the escalators. You will go up the escalators, hop on to your bus and you will go into the city. And a few other people might have this same idea as well—there might be a few hundred people—to get there nice and early, park in the undercover car park at the Gungahlin Marketplace or the G shopping centre, park right next to the door, go upstairs, hop on to a bus and go into the city.
Those people might never spend a dollar at the Gungahlin Marketplace or the G shopping centre, yet those businesses would be providing the parking—and they would be losing money because for the rest of the day all the parking spots right next to the door would be taken up by commuters. Park and ride is a good concept, but why should these businesses have to cop it? Why shouldn’t the ACT government provide the park and ride stations? It seems to me this whole idea is very poorly thought out.
The Greens, Ms Le Couteur and Ms Bresnan, asked what we have got against trials. In this case it is a million dollars being spent on the exact same route as the No 5 service. That was the trial. The No 5 service has been in operation since network 08. There is your trial. Why don’t we just look at the timetables of the No 5 service? Why don’t we look at the patronage of that? Why do we have to rebrand it? Why do we have to spend a fortune on promotion to brand something which is the same as the No 5 service?
It is not surprising that my office has been contacted by a number of transport economists and also by a number of bus drivers who have expressed concern about the way this whole thing is panning out. When you look at it, you have got a park and ride without the park, and you have got a Redex express service which is not an express. You have also got a connection service that you cannot connect to. It is all very well to have a 15-minute frequency, a 15-minute rapid service; but if the feed-in service is not at that same level of consistency, at that same rapid extent, you are going to be held up by whatever your route service is. And let us not forget that every route service is going on to the city anyway on the same roads. So the time it is going to take to wait at a bus stop is the time that you could have spent at your destination. The time between getting off your route bus and waiting for a Redex is where the fat is in this system.
There is way too much fat in this system. This system is totally dependent upon people being at the Gungahlin Marketplace. As anybody who has been to Gungahlin knows, there are not that many houses, there are not that many residents, in the Gungahlin Marketplace. In and around the Gungahlin town centre there are not that many residents. I think we need to have more residents there. We need to have more commercial activity there as well. But there are not that many residents, so somehow people have to get to the Gungahlin Marketplace.
I looked earlier at the stats of going into the city. The stats going away from the city in the afternoon are actually quite stark. Again, it is all very well to have a 15-minute service from the city going to the Gungahlin Marketplace. But, if you have got to wait for a connection at the Gungahlin Marketplace, you are only as fast as your last connection. So, for instance, if you wanted to get the No 51 bus, which leaves the Gungahlin Marketplace at 3.50, you could just hop on it in the city at 3.28 or you could get the 3.25 Redex service to make the connection—three minutes slower. If you want to get the No 52 bus, which leaves the Gungahlin Marketplace at 4.03, you could just get the No 52 bus in the city at 3.41 or you could get the Redex to connect at 3.25—leaving 16 minutes earlier in the city to catch the bus.
If you look at the afternoon routes, they range from being a minute slower through to 16 minutes slower. If you are going to Nicholls, Ngunnawal, Amaroo or Forde in the afternoon, it is absolutely impossible to use the Redex service to get there faster than you would on a 51, 52 or 59—absolutely impossible.
It is all very well to say that this is a trial and we have got to give it a go. But this trial has not been thought out very well at all. It is a million dollars of taxpayers’ money that could have been spent better. For every single one of the 28 services that go from the city to the Gungahlin Marketplace—for every single one of them—you are better off sticking to your existing route service than getting on your route service and changing at the Gungahlin Marketplace.
It seems to me that this service has not been very well thought out. It seems to me that this government are quite anti small business, because they are taking up small business car parks. The Gungahlin traders are already doing it tough. They are doing it tough because there is very little commercial activity out there other than retail. The only incentive people have to go to Gungahlin Marketplace is the convenience of the free parking. If that parking is no longer free, or it is no longer available because hundreds of commuters are treating it as a park and ride station because this government will not invest in a park and ride in Gungahlin, it would be a real tragedy for the Gungahlin traders. They are already doing it tough, and they are going to be doing it much tougher because of what this government have done in not planning properly and squandering $1 million which could have been spent so much better for Gungahlin transport.