2014 Press Release
Metro believes that relocating Launceston’s CBD bus interchange away from their current position in St Johns St would be detrimental to bus patrons and may hurt city businesses.
The vast majority of Metro’s service runs for routes from the city to the surrounding suburbs currently commence or terminate at the St John St interchange.
Each year we have more than 470,000 boardings on services from the CBD interchange by commuters, students, shoppers, people coming to the city to access health and other services and visitors.
Our concern is that proposals to relocate the bus interchange away from the CBD, as floated by the Launceston City Council at the CityProm Members event last week, could make bus travel less convenient and may deter people from travelling into the city on buses.
Among the options floated include retaining the current bus stop and interchange with some relatively minor changes, relocating those services to the Cimitiere Street Transit Centre, making St John Street one-way and locating bus stops and shelters in the centre of the street to remove congestion from footpaths or moving services to some other transit centre location.
Crucial to any decision will be to understand what bus patrons, businesses and the Launceston community actually want, so we agree that broad consultation should be a key element of the City Heart Project and encourage bus passengers and others to make their views known to the Council.
Mass public transport provides many social, economic and environmental benefits. Public transport helps address social exclusion by making transport to services more accessible.
It reduces traffic congestion and pollution and businesses benefit from the number of people who start or finish their journeys in the city.
One of Metro’s key goals is to increase bus patronage. We aim to achieve that by making bus travel more convenient and a better experience through initiatives like the introduction of Greencard, and Journey Planner, the progressive replacement of old buses with modern, low emission and wheelchair accessible buses and security cameras to improve passenger safety.
We’re also reviewing routes across the state with the aim of speeding up travelling times and improving the reliability of published bus service times.
Metro knows from its own surveys of bus patrons that as well as bus fares, convenience and regularity of services are also major factors in people’s choices of whether to use a car or take a bus.
Imagine the traffic and parking problems that would arise if many people, instead of travelling on buses, chose to come into the city by car.
Or, instead of going into the city at all, decided to go elsewhere to shop.
We are currently working with Launceston City Council and CityProm on a Bus Interchange Review group and are more than happy to continue to work with them and the Department if Infrastructure, Energy and Resources to find ways to improve facilities and services in Launceston’s CBD.
However, Metro’s strong preference is to retain the current interchange but to improve the service for passengers and the amenity for adjacent businesses and pedestrians.
COMMENT: 2021
Albeit with the wisdom of hindsight, it turns out that Launceston Town Hall's plan to toy with 'theatre bizarre', social engineering and ‘civic planning' all at once has been among the greatest of follies in the city's history. In fact, if it wasn't actually calamitous it would actually be some weird form of theatre bizarre – black comedy too perhaps.
Arguably ‘the plan’ – such as it was – had as much relevance and usefulness as that rather old metaphor, the “ashtray on a motor bike”. Useful information badly written is way more valuable than useless, misguided and ill-informed concepts ‘properly written and cleverly drawn’ in bureaucratise without errors of spelling or grammar.
It turns out that poor research, hubris and blatant cockiness, in the end just does not cut it.
In the 2021 we need to be reimaging public transport, not tinkering with bus stops. We need to reimagine what were once ‘roads’ as all sorts of different things. We might do so, provided that the ‘think tank’ has the brightest, the most creative, the most educated, the most discriminating ‘thinkers’ in the room.
As for the others, well Mark Twain (1835-1910) said it best, “it is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Time is a terrifying judge when it comes to foolishness and currently it seems that it is handing down its verdict in a car park just around the corner from Launceston’s Town Hall. The wise judges tell us that the real fault is to have the fault and amendment is both unlikely and evasive.
Dr. Tandra Vale Sept v2021
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