Newcastle Council has made a wish list to the NSW government for more frequent and direct bus and train services, price caps and real-time transportation monitoring, among other things. As an International student at the University of Newcastle, I can easily sympathise with the Council, though their ideas seem a bit costly. Firstly, why would you have more busses all day, when you really should only have more during “peak” hours? Having the busses run every 15 minutes during the day and 30 minutes at night seems a bit excessive when there’s hardly anyone riding between 10am and 3pm.
Deciding upon a “peak” transit time would also help for price capping. If you have “off-peak” and “peak” prices not only would there be a better intake of fares, but more people would be encouraged to travel during the “off-peak” times. Students who would normally drive to University may be encouraged to ride the bus or train if they knew it’d be cheaper. They would not have to wait around for 45 minutes to an hour or drive around the car parks hunting for a space. Currently, students who work (part or full time), external students, and International Students(changed in 2013) are not able to have concession passes. That also lowers the amount of riders on public transportation, most cannot afford the extra cost of living and find it is easier to justify driving or choose to live closer to campus.
For people who live a fair distance from their work or studies, it’s helpful to be able to accurately plan out when you leave your home to get to your destination on time. As it is now, we rely upon timetables to give us an approximate time for when the bus or train will arrive. From personal experience I know that the busses can be counted on to be anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes late on any given day. Very often I’ve observed that this is not due to traffic, but to an archaic fare collection where the driver is made to count out change because customers do not have the correct fare.
In the United States busses are all monitored by workers at the transportation HUB, which are then transmitted into an easily accessed phone system or website. Each bus is also equipped with fare machines which accept change, “fare vouchers” and have a swipe slot for transit passes. These are two systems that I strongly believe the Hunter Valley Region transportation systems would heavily benefit from.
The real-time monitoring allows the traveller to carefully plan out what bus, shuttle, tram, or train will get them to their destinations on time or what one they need to catch to arrive earlier. While the fare boxes allow the travellers to get onto the bus and seated with hardly any hassle. Fare vouchers are purchased at grocery stores, much like the passes here can be purchased through News Agencies and the Post Office.
Having the fare boxes also allows the driver to focus more on the driving and being able to answer travellers questions without others having to wait to get on. Since the passes here already have a strip on the back, it wouldn’t be that difficult to make is so that they were able to be swiped. I believe that making transportation simpler and more convenient for the traveller would encourage more people to use it and that in turn, would bring in more revenue for the travel system.