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What the community needs from our public transport system
A survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics* has revealed key strategies required to improve southeast Queensland’s transport system.
The study showed that 80% of people drove to work or study, while in Queensland only 10% of people used public transport.
35% of Queenslanders surveyed reported that they did not use public transport because there simply was not a public transport service in their area.
“This shows that if we provided more public transport services then we could take tens of thousands of cars off the road each day,” said CAST spokesperson Tristan Peach.
25% reported they did not use public transport because the services were not available at a convenient time, and 14% said that travel times were too long.
“This could be easily fixed too,” said Mr. Peach “By increasing the frequency of services and speeding up services by doing simple things like providing more bus lanes on existing roads”.
“We think the State government’s commitment to extremely expensive busway tunnels is not the most cost-effective way to improve public transport – just put more bus lanes on existing roads.”
“This survey shows that government have failed to provide the people of Queensland with an adequate public transport system, and that’s why we’re experiencing these car congestion and pollution problems.”
“But this survey also shows just how easy it would be to get people out of their cars and into sustainable transport,” said Mr Peach.
CAST believes public transport funding in Brisbane City Council’s 2007/2008 budget must be increased to 35% of the transport budget (in 2006/2007 it was less than 20%), with the money invested into more bus services across the city.
The state government must speed up the delivery of additional train carriages to deal with over-crowding in peak hours which would also allow trains to run at higher frequencies throughout the week.
Media contact: Tristan Peach 0416478615
* Australian Bureau of Statistics, Environmental issues: people’s views and practices 4602.0 (released November 2006)
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2 comments:
Your improvements to public transport are at the expense of private transport - e.g. making existing lanes bus lanes, putting more buses on existing roads instead of busways. You are not just improving public transport, you are making private transport facilities worse.
This is an imposition (via government) on people's choice of transport. You are making one option worse to force people into choosing the option you want.
When you say you want to 'get people out of their cars and into sustainable transport' you apparently mean it in the sense of coercing them, not merely encouraging them and letting them make a free choice. You are making decisions for other people.
You are also asking the government to take greater control of our means of transport. It will be regimented transport. It will be controlled at the whim of bureaucrats. It may even be sold to private monopoly interests; or if not, administrated in their interests.
Not everybody believes that vehicle emissions cause climate change either. You are imposing your opinion on others by deciding their transport conditions for them accordingly.
This coercion indicates that improving public transport can't make it as good as private transport. If it could, people would voluntarily choose it. You are making transport in Brisbane worse, not better.
Allan Moorhead
I'd like to make it clear that I'm commenting here as a member of the community who is affected by decisions about transport; not as an unwitting dupe of the construction industry.
I don't yet own a car, so I travel to work by bus. I'll describe my daily journey to work and you will see why I don't like bus travel.
From my home I walk three blocks to the bus stop. I have to allow 5 min for the possibility that the bus will be early. I take this bus to the busway station. Wait here 10 min for the next bus - a task requiring vigilance, considering it is the length of a train platform and the buses line up along it, so that those further away cannot be identified. The second bus goes through the City and then does the 'milk run' through the suburbs. After I get off of this bus I walk another three blocks to where I work.
If the bus is late, I am late for work. To avoid this, I would have to catch the previous bus and be at my workplace half an hour early.
The trip home is basically the same except in reverse. It takes me an hour to get to work and an hour to get home. A person I work with lives in Ipswich and takes the same amount of time to drive to and from work that I do to get there by bus. I live in South Brisbane. My workplace is about 20 min drive from my home.
Half of my travel time is spent walking or waiting, so I can't use all of it to read or do something else constructive - or even relax -with that part of my day. Nor am I paid to do it.
Remember that I do all of this twice every day.
I greatly doubt that the frequency of the buses or the number of bus routes can be increased enough to significantly reduce this inherent rigmorole.
The threat of having the option of travelling to work by car being closed off horrifies me. I don't think it needs to be - I disagree with all of the arguments for why it does.
No vested financial interests are involved. It is purely an issue of 'livability'.
Allan Moorhead
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