Ministerial Statement: Go Card

[ozbob]

Queensland Parliament Hansard 24th February 2010

Go Card

Hon. RG NOLAN (Ipswich—ALP) (Minister for Transport) (10.25 am): The go card is continuing its rollout across the South-East Queensland TransLink network. This week for the first time the go card is expected to be used to make more than two million trips across the TransLink network. Since 4 January, 150,000 go cards have been issued through more than 400 go card retailers across the south east as well, of course, by people ringing 131230 or buying a go card over the net. This is yet another important milestone for our go card, making it the most used smart card in Australia.

The go card is consistently surpassing expectations and forecasts. Since it was rolled out in 2008, more than 72 million trips have been made on a go card and more than $187 million has been loaded on to the smart cards. Today, over half of all public transport trips are taken using a go card and, with students returning to university campuses through this week, it is clear that the record number of customers touching on and off will continue to rise.

These are all encouraging signs because the go card is providing enormous time savings for commuters. If you catch a bus, as almost 400,000 people do each day, it takes three seconds to touch on and off with a go card as opposed to on average 11 seconds to board and pay the driver whilst fishing around for change. Go cards are also increasingly capturing vital information which gives TransLink accurate data on passenger movements which helps to better plan and improve the network. This is a much more cost-effective way to address crowding as TransLink is able to target hot spots down to an individual stop or station level.

It is early days, but this new level of data is already being used to begin improving bus services, such as the additional 20,000 seats a week back-to-uni package that began operating on Monday. Ultimately, a paperless public transport system will deliver information which will help maximise every public dollar and every dollar in fare spent by government and by commuters in the south east.

http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/view/legislativeAssembly/hansard/documents/2010.pdf/2010_02_24_Qtime.pdf

[dwb]

Pfft, it might be true that go card will eventually provide some good data, but they shouldn't need it to improve the obvious!

[#Metro]

Today, over half of all public transport trips are taken using a go card and, with students returning to university campuses through this week, it is clear that the record number of customers touching on and off will continue to rise.

You have the data, let see some more new rail services..

[longboi]

Pfft, it might be true that go card will eventually provide some good data, but they shouldn't need it to improve the obvious!

I don't think the causes of congestion are always obvious though. Sure, you can look at a crowded train and say "Buy more trains" but perhaps there are other ways to alleviate that crowding by better analyzing travel data.

Instead of looking at each bus/train/ferry on a case by case basis you can look at overall travel patterns to better improve timing for popular connections and see exactly what stops are being use and where people are going to in order to tailor PT routes matched specifically to popular travel patterns.

[dwb]

What I meant was that local customers (or drivers even) can usually tell you about their service in quite some detail, they don't see a map they see the cumulative experiences they've had on a service over many years.

For example I recently suggested to Translink that it review route 374 in light of the opening of the inner northern busway and integrating it with route 385 rather than 375 as passengers clearly prefer the 385 even if only travelling to paddington or bardon, reducing service quality for those in the gap. But every afternoon in peak outbound and morning in peak inbound the 374 is practically empty while 385 is often full leaving passengers behind.

The organisation shouldn't require a computer to tell them something that a person or group of people can with more accuracy!