Article: Hikes not cool for Cats

[ozbob]

From the Sunday Mail 19th September 2010 page 38

Hikes not cool for Cats

[Golliwog]

We just had our union election at UQ and one of the parties was saying they were going to make on campus parking for staff and students only. Apparently a survey had been done which indicated CBD workers were parking on campus then catching the citycat to work. Recently UQ itself has put up signs at all the parking meters saying parking is for staff and students only, but theres currently no real way to enforce that. Still, if a way is found to enforce it AND the report was true then they should be looking at another patronage drop.

[#Metro]

Wow 

I think the CityCat is good but it is already pretty slow.
With more stops added (West End/Milton) it will become even slower.

If fares are going up, the frequency needs to go up too.
There are also no top-up machines at major CityCat stops- this could become a big problem when everything goes paperless in January. People catch the CityCat at night, there aren't really stores around the CityCat stops that you can top up at those times.

IMHO most of the CityFerry stops should be replaced with CityCats that run a second route all day.

[Golliwog]

Could it also be due to the increase in go card use? It could make their passenger counts more accurate, so this isn't necessarily a decrease in patronage just their previous patronage was inflated. How exactly do they record the patronage of paper ticket users on the citycat?

[ButFli]

We just had our union election at UQ and one of the parties was saying they were going to make on campus parking for staff and students only. Apparently a survey had been done which indicated CBD workers were parking on campus then catching the citycat to work. Recently UQ itself has put up signs at all the parking meters saying parking is for staff and students only, but theres currently no real way to enforce that. Still, if a way is found to enforce it AND the report was true then they should be looking at another patronage drop.

It might be true, but I suspect the extent of the problem has been embelished for political purposes. I think certain parties look at the success of "turn the boats around" policies at the Federal level and try to manufacture similar "us and them" issues at the University level that they can solve by excluding the outsiders. A party in the QUT association of law students election claimed that the law library was full of engineering students taking "our" resources and that they promised to fix it by enacting a law-student-only policy. Never mind that no one had ever seen an engineering student in the law library and that most of the resource hogging was done by law students looking at facebook and youtube.