The organisation doing the panning is a rail advocacy group, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re not happy with a policy to discount the price of buses without doing the same for trains.
But they’re kind of right. Buses are a less efficient form of transport than trains. It’s disappointing that they would be making buses so much cheaper to use than trains, and thus incentivising people to choose the bus rather than the train, even in situations where both are viable for the trip, or even the train is the better option.
But of course, this is a Council election, and Council has some control over buses. They have no control over trains. So discounting the trains isn’t an option for them. Ideally, the State government would match this by cutting the price of trains as well, but I just can’t see it as a bad thing that the price would be cut when our public transport is as expensive as it is.
Is there really a choice between the bus and train here though? Some places unfortunately can only be accessed by bus. Typically areas where the network is duplicated the trains are faster anyway. In saying that we still have rubbish public transport and it needs to beat the crap out of driving a Corolla to the city in terms of cost, comfort, efficiency and flexibility for more people to consider it rather than driving in. That is, without some work by government to force people onto public transport.
Typically areas where the network is duplicated the trains are faster anyway
You would think that, but it’s not always the case.
Toowong to CBD, for example. I checked just now and the train would take 50% more time than the best bus option according to Google Maps’ estimate. Now, that calculus may change in peak hour, but especially if your actual start location is not Toowong but somewhere like UQ—which is sadly not served by a single train, despite being the biggest trip generator in the city after the CBD—it’s easy to see why someone would already choose the bus. As much as I do think we’d be better off if we can encourage people to embrace moving away from single-seat journeys, when moving to the mode which is supposed to be the higher-volume higher-speed trunk is actually slower even before you account for swapping time, that seems a hard sell.
But anyway, that wasn’t my point. I was actually thinking about a more typical case like Toombul to CBD or Carseldine to CBD, where the train is the better option. What I don’t want is to see a situation created where someone deliberately chooses the worse option because it’s cheaper. That’s a perverse incentive.
