PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Dr MCFETRIDGE (Morphett) (15:56): The coughs and colds on the other side are something that I am trying to avoid catching—but today I want to talk about catching a bus, or trying to catch a bus. The government in its budget has allocated funding for the leasing of 20 buses this financial year and the purchase of 20 buses for the next three financial years; so 80 extra buses in total. For a number of years now I have been saying that we are getting some new buses, but they are new buses to replace the old buses. This year at least there is a glimmer of hope about getting some extra buses, because that is what we have been saying for years now that we need.

In fact, I was a little puzzled at the support the government was getting from the bus industry about the measured increase in the provision of extra buses, because not long ago I had one of the senior bus industry people sitting in my office saying that we needed 50 extra buses today. That was six months ago. But what are we seeing in this budget? We are seeing 20 second-hand buses. I understand that some of them are 25 to 30 years old. They certainly will not be Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) compliant, or if they are I will be very surprised about that. We are seeing 20 old buses coming back in. They are going to have to be reinsured, re-serviced and rechecked to ensure that they are even roadworthy. Certainly we will be watching very carefully the way the government goes about bringing these buses on line.

It is a good thing that we are getting extra buses. It is well overdue, as I have said, and certainly it will not be enough to cope with the increasing demand on public transport that we are seeing because of the increase in fuel prices. We have a marginal dip in fuel prices at the moment, but we have heard what the experts are saying. I will be very surprised if we reach the $8 mark as quickly as some pundits are saying, and I hope we don't, but certainly the $3 per litre mark within a couple of years is a scary thought. However, with the increasing interest rates and the increasing fuel prices we are already seeing an increase in the number of people wanting to use buses. They want to use the buses. Some of them cannot get on the buses because the buses do not go near them or the services are not at the times when they would like them to be available. The other problem that we have is that the buses just do not have the carrying capacity.

The bus services in South Australia need to be linked in with train and tram services. I spoke to a lady a few weeks ago who had a meeting in Adelaide at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. She left her Aldinga home at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. By the time she had caught the bus to Noarlunga, the train from Noarlunga to Adelaide, went to the meeting, caught the train back to Noarlunga, then the bus back to Aldinga, she got home at 10 to 10 that night. That is totally unacceptable. Obviously that is a growing suburb down south. We look forward to the government making announcements about what it is going to do down there. It needs to ensure that bus services are not provided in a limited capacity to people who have no alternative to public transport. In the metropolitan area it is something that is an absolute urgent issue, and 20 extra buses is not enough.

I am not saying that we need to put more and more buses on just for the sake of it. It is just not enough and that is what the industry experts are telling me; 50 buses six months ago. Some of these second-hand buses will be going onto the O-Bahn. I will be interested to note the life of those buses on the O-Bahn and what will happen to increase the carrying capacity on the O-Bahn, because you cannot keep running more and more services. It is a bit like the second-hand trams that we are going to get to improve the carrying capacity on the tramline. The problem is that those trams cannot carry any more passengers per tram. You cannot couple those trams together so that you have individual units travelling on that tramline. We will have increased numbers of trams travelling as individual units in the same way that smaller buses have to run more frequently.

So, what happens? With buses you will get congestion of the roads and with increased trams you will get increased closure times of the tram crossings. Every tram crossing from Brighton Road through to Adelaide will be closed for that extra time because extra trams will be running. We need extra carrying capacity, not just extra trams. If the government had bought the right trams in the first place we would not have this problem. With respect to the buses, we need to make sure these buses will not simply be a stopgap. There needs to be a real plan for increased carrying capacity, because the issue of more people wanting to use public transport will not go away.

Let us make sure that we can get people onto public transport, not just because of a decreased ability to stretch their budgets further but because that is the way we want to go—getting cars off our roads. The greenhouse effect is something we need to be taking note of when planning public transport. Public transport planning needs to be integrated. We need to ensure that the facilities we put in place will achieve the outcomes we want, and that is a clean, green future for South Australia with a very good carrying capacity on modern public transport. What we are getting at the moment are secondhand buses and secondhand trams.