Alistair Coe: still complaining about dead running

[Barry Drive]

Alistair Coe is once more reminding Canberra how much money the Labor Government 'wastes' in dead running buses. Apparently, it's $47,000 per weekday.

But he offers no solutions to this supposed problem and never once mentions how it was a Liberal Government which closed Woden Depot in the first place for efficiency reasons.

The full post from Mr Coe is as follows:

Information obtained by the ACT Opposition shows the ACT Labor Government wastes $47,000 every weekday on ACTION buses with no passengers onboard. ACT Shadow Transport Services Minister Alistair Coe said for empty buses to travel for almost 20,000 kilometres every weekday [is] an utterly disgraceful misuse of taxpayer money.

"Due to ACT Labor's mismanagement of the ACTION bus service, taxpayers are forking out over $12 million every year for empty buses which travel between depots and the start of routes," Mr Coe said.

"This is $1 million every month for buses with no people in them. And instead of these figures improving, they're getting worse.

"Empty ACTION buses now travel the equivalent of the earth's equator every two days, and it's an absurd and unnecessary waste of taxpayer money.

"This wasted $47,000 per weekday could be spent on improving the substandard bus system through better route services. In fact, the cost of dead running is about the same as purchasing a new bus every week.

"This is misuse of taxpayer money at its worst and comes down to basic management. You only have to look at shift rotations, route planning and where buses are able to fill up to see that this is an issue of ACT Labor's making.

"Canberrans shouldn't be paying $12 million a year for empty buses because ACT Labor can't manage ACTION," Mr Coe concluded.

[The Love Guru]

We could get rid of all dead running and just run services out of Belconnen and Tuggeranong from 5am and also run inbound services until 1am. Of course, that would cost more money than dead running a bus that wouldn't be carrying any pax if it was in service anyway!

[Buzz Killington]

Mr Coe's figures would have been from Network 2010. Naturally he doesn't mention this, but it would be nice to know what impact Network 2012 has had in its month or so of operation. Wasn't cutting down dead running one of the objectives of the new network?