23 May 2009

Mitchell to the City on ACTION

| Sgt.Bungers
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This morning I had to drop my car in for a service in Mitchell. I then chose to take an ACTION bus to City Interchange to go to work. I caught the 56 bus at 8:46am from the North Western end of Mitchell. I got off the bus in the City Interchange at 9:18am. 32 minutes to travel 8.7km. An average of 16.3km/h. I then had to walk to my office closer to ANU, another 12 minutes thanks to the fun that is crossing Northbourne Avenue on foot, with signals timed for a 5-6 minute waiting time for pedestrians. All up, 9.3km took me 44 minutes using the fasted available means of public transport in peak hour, or 12.7km/h average.

My point, mainly that someone with average fitness could have jogged to the City from Mitchell in less time than it took me to utilise ACT public transport this morning. Someone with good fitness could have done it in 30% less time.

Should travel times like this be considered an acceptable caveat when utilising a cheap form of “environmentally friendly” transport? Is this really an attractive, acceptable, viable solution to getting us out of our less viable (long term) private means of transport?

If not, what can we do to improve environmentally friendly transport to and from the city from the North in peak hour? AM/PM bus lanes on Northbourne? 24h bus lanes on the median of Northbourne? Light Rail? A massive, free car park at EPIC, with express busses running every 2-3 minutes from it, into the City in peak hour? Completely flatten Canberra and rebuild it with the aim of fitting all residents into an 80% smaller footprint?

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richardh99358:02 pm 06 Jul 09

High-speed Aerial Ropeways are the answer. Ski-lifts or gondolas are the things that hang off the aerial ropeway. All the engineering is in the ropeway, so that’s what the engineers call them.

Montreal will install one soon, mostly for transport, and a little bit of tourism. The Montreal people cite huge greenhouse and environmental benefits. Greenhouse because the nett momentum of the ropeway is close to zero. (Goings are about the same as comings, so it takes only a small amount of energy to keep it all spinning. Like a travelator.) Environmental impact is very low, because posts are about four square metres, and placed about every seventy metres.

We’d need a little innovation to develop junctions, so that gondolas could join and leave, using spur lines. A little GPS and microwave electronics, and we’re away with a world first.

What would it cost? A lot less than a highway.

So, look forward to a leather-seated personal gondola parked in your garage.

Hells_Bells7410:33 am 20 Jun 09

I just realised I was in the archives.. normally try to keep my thoughts to myself when it’s been a month almost since the last comments. Oops again..

Hells_Bells7410:14 am 20 Jun 09

Why do I keep hearing how poor ACTION is? If year after year something fails and still gets public funding plus more funding from people’s pockets to get on the bus, I would say it’s not working! Next..

Not to mention the right to use public transport is a basic human right and they are offering one bus company, one taxi company and little else to get around and calling them private for all money, but completely controlling them like public (all the time mandating to keep competition away – how does that make money to call itself private?) and making us pay for something that should possibly be free to use, but that opens another can of worms with sovereign rights and all.

>AM/PM bus lanes on Northbourne?

Yep. Lots of Australian cities are adopting the tan/green gravel paint to denote bus lanes. Apply this to one lane each way on Northbourne, mark it as a peak hour transit T3 lane, enforce it by having cameras to detect law breakers.

TP 3000 said :

The only people to blame are the ACT Labour Party & ACT Greens. They tell TAMS to tell ACTION to improve services, but without extra buses or money. ACTION try their best & will ALWAYS end up in debt at the end of the year. In fact if your bus doesn’t turn up from Monday 25 May 2009, write a letter bitching & moaning to John Stanhope & the ACT Labour Party & the ACT Greens Party asking them why do you try & make the public think that bus services have improved, but then you don’t give ACTION the money required, so this means that services can’t be improved.

Bla bla bla everything is the governments fault. F(_)ck that never gets tiring.
If ACTION aren’t getting any money or busses why does their website state that they are purchasing 100 accessible busses over 3 years.
Without money or busses? What about the additional 100 buses they are providing over the 3 years?

The only people to blame are the ACT Labour Party & ACT Greens. They tell TAMS to tell ACTION to improve services, but without extra buses or money. ACTION try their best & will ALWAYS end up in debt at the end of the year. In fact if your bus doesn’t turn up from Monday 25 May 2009, write a letter bitching & moaning to John Stanhope & the ACT Labour Party & the ACT Greens Party asking them why do you try & make the public think that bus services have improved, but then you don’t give ACTION the money required, so this means that services can’t be improved.

I ask everyone to do this, as ACTION do try their hardest, but because of Belconnen Changes, they are now short of buses & the bus makers can only deliver 2 buses a month, so ACTION have been sent up the Murrumbidgee River without a paddle. So I don’t want to hear about anyone abusing ACTION staff next week, just abuse the political parties. But I would love to hear their responses.

Gungahlin Al9:17 am 24 May 09

JC said :

The OP hit the nail on the head. Canberra is way too spread out for any form of public transport to work in the suburbs. Shrinking the city into an 80% smaller foot print would work, although if we did that we might as well walk everywhere. We could possibly even really justify trams if we were that small a city!

Hog. Wash.

JC you hit on the actual reason with your next par that says that every route wanders around all over the camp, thereby putting the lie to your first claim. What we need is more express routes, and buses (note folks that’s two esses not three, as the Canberra Times had in a headline last week) need to get out of the left lane on Northbourne so the express routes aren’t locked into conga lines behind three others at every stop.

But a lot of it it beyond Action’s control – it’s the finite limit of Northbourne Ave peak traffic, and that is a function of the time we can allow our kids to go to school – and the single carriageway status of the GDE…

I knew I was on a loser when one morning I saw a girl with cerebral palsy walking along the footpath near Wakefield Ave. She beat me to Barry Drive. On foot, with CP – a fair bit slower than ‘walking pace’.

I can leave home at 8.25 and arrive in Civic at 9.00. But if I leave at 8.50, I get there at 9.10 – almost half the time. And turning off the engine when faced with a full traffic lights cycle saves a bucket of fuel too.

But better is to have a clear route straight down the middle of Northbourne. It should be dual-directional light rail. But it could be a one-way tidal bus lane in the interim. And buses would get all that time during light changes when there is no right-turn traffic to run right through without a stop unless needed and no traffic to battle.

Then you’d see people (northside at least) swing over from driving to PT in droves.

“My point, mainly that someone with average fitness could have jogged to the City from Mitchell in less time than it took me to utilise ACT public transport this morning. Someone with good fitness could have done it in 30% less time.”

Begs the question why you didn’t then

VYBerlinaV8_the_one_they_all_copy8:10 am 24 May 09

The buses in Canberra are ok IF you want to go only between major centres.

Buses don’t even viably service where I live (10 bucks and an hour and a half to the city last I checked), so for the short term I’ll enjoy the burble up the Monaro Hwy in the V8. Free/cheap parking can still be found in most places if you know where to look.

Given the small percentage of travel that public transport makes up of the total if you were to reduce car travel by 5% then public transport would have to double in size. Can you see twice the people fitting on ACTION ?

bd84 said :

It’s the same story for almost every bus route in Canberra, except most people’s journey will be about an hour for what takes no more than 25 mins in the car.

I’ve said it about a million times that people will not catch a bus for as long as they take the scenic route and aren’t a decent comparison for travel time in a car. Yes it is fixable with money and some common sense in the bus routes, but they keep the same long sceneic routes and just add rubbish services like the “redex”. Shorter and more direct services will get people on buses.

They do the scenic route because they have to do a route to pick up passengers along the way. If money wasn’t an issue you might have 1 bus router serving just one suburb running every 15 minutes. Then they wouldn’t need to meander through the suburbs and you might stand a better chance of getting people on the bus. But this is not realistic option.

park n rides. I keep nagging about this, but bloody hell if they work in yankland, they sure can work here.

the crap buses are one reason why I don’t have my car serviced in Mitchell! I only catch buses when the car is getting its oil, it’s always an interesting adventure.

Wow, the GDE must have really made a difference out there. When I was living in Gungahlin, it used to take atleast 45 minutes to drive into the City and find a park.

I’ve recently started taking the bus again, and I must say, I’ve been happy with the experience so far, and I can’t see why everyone bags on ACTION all the time, and even though it takes 2 busses to get from southside to the city, the whole journey only takes an extra 15-20 minutes than it would have if I was driving to work and having to look for a park.

It’s the same story for almost every bus route in Canberra, except most people’s journey will be about an hour for what takes no more than 25 mins in the car.

I’ve said it about a million times that people will not catch a bus for as long as they take the scenic route and aren’t a decent comparison for travel time in a car. Yes it is fixable with money and some common sense in the bus routes, but they keep the same long sceneic routes and just add rubbish services like the “redex”. Shorter and more direct services will get people on buses.

gomer said :

Less than 40 years from now it is likely that we will not be able to afford to commute to work because fuel will be too expensive (the other option is walking/riding by the way).

Certainly too expensive to be commuting by yourself in an average sized car. Perhaps not too expensive to carpool with 4 other people or catch the bus though.

gomer said :

The only solution I can see is that work needs to be spread out. Reduce the need for big roads into the city by setting a desk spaces to local accommodation ratio.

Hmmmm, one thing Canberra’s town centres show is that just because you put offices near people’s homes doesn’t mean that that’s where they’ll go to work. Spreading workplaces around the city would just make public transport a nightmare to coordinate.

Less than 40 years from now it is likely that we will not be able to afford to commute to work because fuel will be too expensive (the other option is walking/riding by the way). It is unlikely that the majority will want to live in 80’s Japanese tubes so they can be close to work. There is no easy way to make 300,000+ people close to the middle of a city. So what then? The Griffin plan was great assuming that you believe what calvin coolidge said about technology always solving our problems, but I think global warming is a good example of the hole in his statement. The only solution I can see is that work needs to be spread out. Reduce the need for big roads into the city by setting a desk spaces to local accommodation ratio.

I vote the last option. If we stuck more closely to Griffin’s plan instead of saying ‘you’re fired, we don’t have any more money’ we wouldn’t be stupidly spread out so much and the civic centre would actually be more central.

The OP hit the nail on the head. Canberra is way too spread out for any form of public transport to work in the suburbs. Shrinking the city into an 80% smaller foot print would work, although if we did that we might as well walk everywhere. We could possibly even really justify trams if we were that small a city!

The reason it takes so long to get from say Kippax to say Russell is the bus from Kippax has to meander through our large spread out suburbs stopping at every stop to pick up passengers then take them somewhere central, such as an interchange, although guess now in Belconnen that now means the side of the road. That alone takes the best part of 30 minutes.

Then you (mostly) need to change buses to the trunk route to the city. That takes maybe 5 minutes. Then the trunk route needs to get to the city. Once upon a time that took 15 minutes, but now it goes a different way which takes an extra 5, but for good reason, so as to serve more locations. So now we are already up to 50 minutes.

Next you need to change again, that might take 5 minutes if the bus is already there, but for the sake of averages lets say it takes 10 (assuming a bus city to Russel every 15 mins). Then it takes another 10 minutes to get through the city to Russell. So all up the trip has taken 1 hour 10 minutes.

By car you could do that trip in about 25 minutes in peak and about 20 off peak. On the bus though, off peak it could take another 30-45 minutes (or more) depending upon the connections.

I challenge anyone to come up with some sensible way of making the trip even 40% faster by bus but still making it affordable to the citizens.

As long as roads remain (relatively) un-congested, and petrol is cheap, public transport will never have the same popularity in Australia that it has in most European and Asian countries.

Alas for those of us who like to drive, I’d be willing to bet petrol will be back pushing $2 a litre as soon as the world comes out of recession. What we should be doing in Canberra is putting in public transport infrastructure and encouraging urban infilling and higher density developments to make public transport more feasible and palatable for ordinary people.

Correctamundo. Bus times to the north continue to be unacceptable. Yet ACT Governments of all colours continue to pretend that more buses are the answer.

The solution is not in rolling stock but in a traffic engineering solution of the type suggested by Sgt.Bungers, except where s/he gets a bit carried away.

ACT Govts just can’t seem to get the bus people to talk to the traffic engineering people.

Terry Snow seems to be able to get things done in Canberra: let’s put him in charge of it.

It’s pathetic. To get to Fairbairn from the northside for instance, it takes two buses and 90 minutes! 25 mins in a car. Probaby only about an hour on a bike (but then you have to dodge all those angry drivers stuck behind a slow moving, mostly empty bus on its way out to Fairbairn).

I often choose to walk home from Civic, which takes about 50 minutes, because I KNOW if I have to wait for a bus, it might take me just as long to walk to the stop, wait for the one bus that goes my way, crowd in with everyone else (thinking swine flu from the heaving masses) for the priviledge of being trundled along on a vehicle with little or no suspension and a driver who brakes so hard, old ladies slide past on their way out – whether they wanted to or not.

Public transport in the ACT is a joke.

I used to live in Duffy and work in Belco. To catch a bus for all but 1 service a day meant Duffy – > Woden – > Civic – > Belco. The 1 quick service was Duffy – > Civic – > Belco. The short service took about 40 minutes. The long one depended on if you managed to get the connections right and which direction you were heading so anywhere from 50 minutes to an hour and a half.

Alternatively I could get out the bike and head up the path to Scrivener dam, then on to Belco in 40-45 minutes depending on head wind.

Public transport will always be slow under most circumstances as a) you have to stop frequently and b) you have to make connections.

Because you went from Mitchell it’s not one of the well populated routes nor an express run it takes some time. If you went from Belco to Civic though it would be not much slower than a car as there are only a few stops.

Ideally you would have a rail network with minimal stops between the major points and run buses to feed the nearest station. Run the trains every 5 minutes and the buses every 10 or 15 and it shouldn’t be too bad. The way the feeder buses currently run every 30 or 60 minutes really does make it painful.

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