Having cut services to inner Belconnen, ACTION cannot help people left behind by overcrowded buses.

Aranda, Cook and Macquarie had two services between Belconnen interchange and Civic until June 2, when the overall weekday timetable changed. Only Route 10 now serves the three suburbs. This has caused crowding on peak services, with some passengers being left behind.

An ACTION spokeswoman said it appreciated the concerns about overcrowding on Route 10.

”ACTION does not have another resource to allocate to this route at this time.”

It expected to add services to the express route at the earliest opportunity to meet the unexpected demand. But without drawing a bus from an existing route, ACTION had no option at the moment to supply further services to alleviate the overcrowding.

ACTION would do its utmost to redirect buses to those areas of greatest need to improve this situation as soon as possible.

The spokeswoman did not answer when asked how many other services left people behind because of overcrowding. She said only that it monitored loadings via driver feedback and customers and had realigned and introduced new services where available to assist with this.

”ACTION is experiencing full passenger loadings on a number of bus services.”

Since the introduction of Network 08 on June2, there had been 14 days on which there had been more than 25,000 adult boardings. In the previous network, daily adult boardings had averaged 22,500.

From Saturday, August 16, to Friday, August 22, there had been 24 service failures from 15,106 services. Reasons for service failures included bus breakdowns and driver illness.

Source: The Canberra Times
Author: Graham Downie

This page was last updated on 26 August 2008

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