Ms BURNET – Thank you, minister. We hear from the community that limited reliability is a factor in people choosing not to use buses. We also know that the four ingredients of a good public transport service is regularity, reliability, predictability and being on time. We’re not really getting that combination very frequently. It’s about as frequent as the bus services at the moment. Where is the real‑time information – what on average are delays to Metro bus services?
I recently heard of a story of somebody travelling from Huntingfield going to Firthside. The bus at Huntingfield was late by three minutes, the Firthside bus early, which makes it unreliable as well, just as an example. Where’s the real‑time information and what on average are the delays to Metro Tasmania bus services?
Mr ABETZ – I dare say nobody necessarily has that specific information, but I can make inquiries for you. I imagine that would take an exceptional amount of work because a three-minute delay would be a delay to yourself, which I think most people would live with a three-minute delay. If you want to add all them up in all the services, that’s going to take some time.
But that said, your initial opening remarks are remarks that I think most people would need to agree with and that is reliability and certainty is something that is a key factor for people engaging with a public transport experience and so that is something that I have mentioned to Metro on a regular basis and once again with the Metro, they will be coming up at the GBEs and the CEO and others can be asked about how they are managing these matters.
Ms BURNET – I’ll give another example of somebody who went to Twitter X, he was talking about a 45-minute wait between buses and then others have a staggered start time. So, somebody starting work at 10.00 is not getting the bus services that have been cancelled. How do you stop the congestion and how do you account for these disruptions to service, which is not helping the economy at all?
Mr ABETZ – Look, I’ve mentioned in the parliament on a number of occasions that Metro and Tasmania are not immune from the driver shortage, which is something Australia is experiencing. There’s a 25 000-driver shortage around Australia.
Ms BURNET – That wasn’t the question, minister.
Mr ABETZ – Yes, but when you have less drivers available then those that do the rosters of the morning, if somebody rings in sick, et cetera, and Metro will be a lot better at explaining all this at the GBE hearings. They’ll be able to tell you that they then have to juggle and decide which services they can and can’t operate on a particular morning when you have a shortage of drivers and then a couple of them call in sick. This happened in recent times with the Bridgewater incidents, people were off on stress leave.
You have to keep all that in mind and in all the circumstances, Metro are doing as good a job I think as they possibly can. That said, I am encouraging them to deal with these matters as possible. They are training more drivers, trying to get more drivers and until that situation is resolved, we will continue to have those unfortunate hiccups in the provision of service.
