The wheels on the bus are getting old and tired
Along time ago now, my car was being repaired and so I tried the local bus service. How hard could it be? I lived close to a major road, I knew where the bus stop was, and I’d left home more than an hour before I needed to be at work, which was, according to Google, a mere 3.7 km away.
When public transport is easy and reliable, it gets used, and it gets used often.
But my one trip in Townsville failed on a number of counts, waiting an hour for a bus then getting yelled at by the driver for not having the correct change, wasn’t a reason to return.
I revisited the topic a couple of years ago, querying whether the rollout of Translink’s you-beaut, new ticketing system would reach us up here, with the answer an unsurprising, ‘nope’.
The Go Card was at least 30 percent cheaper than a single paper ticket, but too bad, so sad if you were in Cairns, Mackay, Toowoomba or Townsville; the four-year rollout only included travel on Translink bus, train, ferry and tram services across greater Brisbane, Ipswich, Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast regions.
Meanwhile in the same timeframe, NSW rolled out the same system across their entire state.
Sure, NSW isn’t as big as Queensland, but if you consider northern regions would not be included in the initial Translink rollout, how long would such embarrassing comparisons be
tolerated?
I’ve been banging on quite a bit recently about the stark difference between services south of us compared to the services we get here in the North, and to put it bluntly, we are underserviced and underrepresented.
If it wasn’t for the introduction of scooters from private entities, I really can’t see how young people could have got around reliably in recent years without being driven by family or friends.
But now Translink is set to attempt to woo users back to the buses, with three new local bus routes available
from Monday 26 June, and later this year, will ‘trial’ new ways of paying using smartphone, smartwatch, debit or credit card.
Trial? Like everyone else in Queensland and the rest of the country has been doing for years now?
OK, sure, better late than never, but how to convince a generation of nonbus users to venture back to public transport?
If you neglect a market long enough, offering a basic service to win back customers won’t cut it.
Like our fast food deliveries, kids are used to being dropped off right at
their door; so how will we convince them to not only choose to walk to a bus stop, but in our extreme heat?
If electronic payments, timetables, and inadequate shelters that don’t protect against tropical heat or rain are addressed, that’d be a start, but what if the bus company could convince the scooter companies to park a few scooters at every stop?
If people can view timetables and track their bus on their phone and get from the bus to their door without the prehistoric concept of ‘exact change,’ who knows?
Maybe that bus hub might turn out to be useful after all.