Would you use Transport Canberra’s buses if they were cleaner and cushier? Photo: Jonathan Borba, Daniel Morton.
It’s hilarious when people suggest Canberra’s public transport should be free. If they used the bus, they’d know that it already is.
Of course, it’s roulette: there’s a chance you’ll get a warrior bus driver who will ask, “Mate, why don’t you get a free Uber instead?” but they generally save those battles for the liars. The riders who get on and are immediately breathless: “So I DID have a MyWay card but I was waylaid by bandits and in the chase I must have dropped it … oh, and there was a Demogorgon at Tuggeranong Interchange in front of the ticket machine and – ”
“Just get on. Stop lying to me and wasting everyone’s time.”
Why bring this up? Because there is a cluster of Canberrans who are still paying for their ride. And I think they deserve something more.
Transport Canberra Business Class.
Here’s how I envision it: you enter at the front door (everyone else enters through the back). You tap on. The driver says g’day. You say top o’ the morning to you too, driver. Your seat is actually clean. Maybe there’s Parisian cafe music piping throughout the cabin. Armrests. A partition, obviously, in the middle of the bus.
Interior lighting could, theoretically, be adjusted to have more of a speakeasy theme. Photo: Amelia Vu.
Meanwhile, anyone who doesn’t wish to pay can enter through the back. They were going to sit in the back anyway, where it’s harder for the prickly driver to smell the vape fumes.
I once made the mistake of sitting in the back of the 182. A group of eshays disliked me immediately because I wouldn’t let them hotspot off my phone. One apparently clocked me as looking at him dreamily.
“You staring at me, bruv? I will kill you. I’ll f**king find where you live, c***!”
I laughed. But at the same time, I would really have rather not been lurched around in a stuffy bus with Mars bar crumbs on the windowsill and some prick threatening to put a brick through the lounge room.
Oh, that’s another idea – Business Class lounges at the non-Civic interchanges, accessed with your MyWay card. There could be coffee facilities, and charging ports. In Canberra, where non-rapid buses are sparse and cold winds blow dead leaves through the interchanges, it would be good if you could settle in and get comfortable.
The next 77 may be hours off, but this is no place to chill. Photo: Region.
Of course, I sense your resentment immediately: “That’s classist!”. I have two answers.
The first is that those passengers who can’t pay are spared the humiliation of making up an excuse and being mocked for it. Canberra gets its free public transport after all. Those who simply don’t want to pay, or aren’t able to wait a week for their MyWay balance to show a top-up, have a real choice. And those who can very well shell out for their ride are encouraged to do so, because for once it might be somewhat competitive with taking the car.
Seniors and mobility-impaired persons obviously get free access to Business Class, so that’s not an issue. They are literally first-class citizens.
My second point is that we obviously wouldn’t call it Business Class on the bus door. Canberrans are elitist, but we don’t like the trappings. We’d call it Commuter Class. Maybe we’d be even subtler for the inner-north buses: it’d simply be called Commuter Cabin. I’d even be open to ‘‘APS6+ Cabin’’.
Over to you. Don’t lecture me in the comments on whether you think it morally or practically objectionable. Would you use it?
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