Article: Springborg express

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Springborg express

Springborg express
Article from: The Courier-Mail

By Terry Sweetman

December 04, 2008 11:00pm

IT'S NICE to see Lawrence Springborg has dismounted from the Excess Express and unloaded some transport policies.

If nothing else, a train excursion and a ride in a big shiny Clive Palmer-sponsored bus have given the Liberal National Party some fleeting insights into the daily drudge of city commuters.

I'm not sure they really get it any more than the Bligh Government really gets it, but it's a start.

However, it seems a bit of a stop-go journey with some mechanical problems.

I know bushies can do wonderful things with eight-gauge fencing wire, but I'm not so sure you can just hook an extra carriage on suburban trains, which presumably are designed with some kind of power-weight ratio in mind.

And the idea that the first and last doors on a seven-car train should be locked to compensate for the overhang on platforms suggests to me a severe lack of commuting experience.

It's the getting on and the getting off that takes time and shreds schedules, a fact recently recognised in Sydney where all new orders are for single-decker trains because of the problems with spill-out from double-decker cars.

Sydney ? admittedly hardly an exemplar when it comes to public transport ? has realised after four decades that what it needs are not bigger trains but more trains.

There, as in Brisbane, size doesn't matter. It's frequency that counts.

A locked-door patch-up that slows loading and unloading (and there are few thing more snail-like than a weary commuter) seems at odds with the LNP's planned $250 million upgrade of the management and safety system to "cut the gap between trains from three minutes to as little as one minute".

It would take more than technology to achieve that within the existing railway culture. More interesting is the free ride proposal, a hip-pocket pitch that has some progressive thinking as a bonus.

It's a lift from Melbourne's early-bird scheme, but no one has a monopoly on good ideas.

It's so good the Government is looking at it, too, or so we're told, although it previously had been remarkably silent on the issue. The plan is that if Go Card users travelled at pre-peak and post-peak periods (6am-7am or 6pm-7pm) they would get one free ride a day, with annual savings of up to $1944.80 a year, say, from Robina to Central.

Sounds good, but it has its limitations. There is just one train each morning (5.23) that would get a Robina commuter to Central by 7am and the LNP concedes its plan would apply to just 38 trains ? 20 in the morning and 18 in the evening.

We could start trains earlier, but that might lead to shift spreads that chew into operating budgets.

Nice for some but, at a conservative $34 million a year, it's an expensive schmooze to a minority of the 150,000 who ride the rattler each day.

Not everyone has access to the Great Flexitime Rort.

But the basic fault with the scheme is a microcosm of the problem that besets the entire Queensland public transport: it will not provide the service people really want.

To provide half-price and relatively uncrowded travel at unfriendly times is not the same as offering cheap and comfortable travel at a time of the commuter's choice.

It's not rocket science, but if government wants to get people out of their cars and on public transport, it has to provide a service that is competitive in terms of cost, comfort, efficiency and convenience.

Delivering on cost (free rides) and comfort (presumably less-crowded carriages) is only halfway there. That's not bad, but many people would believe their private motor vehicle delivers on at least three out of four, which is why they prefer to sit on their bums at traffic lights.

Rather than encouraging more people to take the train, the free-ride scheme seems likely to merely encourage the present users to change schedules.

To present savings in return for inconvenience as an innovation really is an odd way to do business.

And the fact that it is limited to the trains suggests a less than holistic approach to transport and a confirmation of the inadequacies of the Bligh Government's Go Card system which remains rickety on buses and ferries.

While the LNP Building Better Public Transport policy has much merit, there is little to suggest there is a plan to take it much beyond the next election.

And, until it is presented as a part of the giant fiscal jigsaw, we are entitled to wonder how deliverable it is in the context of the Opposition's rejection of deficit budgets.

This will be a continuing problem for the LNP while it presents micro policy without sharing its macro economic vision.

Premier Anna Bligh is rightly harping on this and demanding details on how the LNP might perform a minor economic miracle in straitened times and at what cost to existing programs.

Sadly for her, fewer people are listening, particularly those who begin and end their working days strap-hanging on commuter trains.