Ministerial Statement: Commuters click on www.translink.com.au

[ozbob]

Minister for Transport, Trade, Employment and Industrial Relations
The Honourable John Mickel
18/02/2009

Commuters click on www.translink.com.au

Commuters are increasingly searching for public transport information via the click of a button, with the number of visits to the TransLink website soaring by more than 50 per cent during the past year.

Transport Minister, John Mickel said that TransLink's latest figures have revealed the website www.translink.com.au scored 8,311,337 visits during 2008 - an increase of 54 per cent compared to the previous year.

While internet users visited the site, they viewed a whopping 49,644,165 page views, marking a 50 per cent jump compared to 2007.

"The figures prove people are continually turning to the internet to find out about TransLink's services," Mr Mickel said.

"The TransLink journey planner was used 25,758,012 times in the past year - a staggering 70 per cent increase on the previous year."

In terms of visits, the website's busiest day of the year was August 12 - due to a combination of reasons including fare changes for both the go card and paper tickets - with 32,865 visits registered.

"This was followed by May 19, which generated 31,135 visits because of the opening of the Inner Northern Busway," Mr Mickel said.

"The third busiest day of the year for the TransLink website was February 25 with 30,739 visits due to the rollout of go card in the Brisbane region.

"Meanwhile, the quietest day of the year was January 1, 2008, when the website attracted 9,249 visits - not overly surprising as many people were probably recovering from their celebrations."

Of the 8,311,377 visits to the website, 44 per cent came directly to the URL while 30 per cent involved the use of a search engine.

More than 10 per cent of go card users have bought their cards online by visiting www.translink.com.au/go

"There were 1,686,323 page views for the go card site," Mr Mickel said.

"The best day of the year for the go card site was on August 4 last year with 17,273 page views - that's the day the go card fare restructure kicked in, providing discounts of between 20 and 35 per cent on every journey."

"The roll out of the go card in the Brisbane region on February 25 was also a huge day for the go card website, which experienced 16,281 page views."

Mr Mickel also reminded people that the popular journey planner on the TransLink website could be downloaded onto mobile your phone.

"You simply bookmark the link http://jp.translink.com.au/mobile into your phone," Mr Mickel said.

"People can also SMS for NightLink timetable information - to find out further details visit the TransLink website."

For further information about public transport, please visit www.translink.com.au or call 13 12 30.


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[mufreight]

Must be an election comming, all the Ministerial spin doctors working overtime attempting to make flawed and failed systems such as Translink with ongoing mismanagement and misinformation and ineffectual Ministers look good.
One wonders who is the current Queensland Government propoganda Minister.

[SteelPan]

LoL - Talk about desperate for a Media Release. 
One can only presume the boffins really expected noone to ever use the website and are shocked at its success - I hope they do not seriously count establishing a "popular" web site, as serious progress with public transport issues!

[mufreight]

A too large percentage of those calls would have been to lodge complaints in most cases about the failings of Translink.