At the next Lane Cove Council meeting, the councilors will be discussing the commuter delays currently experienced by Lane Cove Bus Commuters.
It was placed on the agenda after Council received community representations about the excessive waiting times at the Lane Cove Bus Interchange (Stand A – Direct Service to City via Freeway) during the morning peak.
The Agenda item proposes that Council immediately lobby for additional bus services during the morning peak to the City which commence at the Interchange. The Lane Cove Council will also discuss options in relation to a proposal for a Lane Cove underground station in any future expansion of the new Sydney Metro Rail network.
The Council engaged a traffic and transport data company to undertake on-site monitoring of the Lane Cove bus commuters at the interchange over a two-week period from 13 March 2017 to 24 March 2017.
The results of the monitoring found:
The patronage survey identified that buses which arrive at Lane Cove Interchange have insufficient capacity to accommodate all the commuters waiting at the interchange. The data shows that while the average daily morning peak has a waiting time of five minutes, the maximum waiting time is up to 20 minutes. It was observed that a queue of over 100 commuters was on occasions left behind waiting for the next bus due to the buses already being full on arrival at the stop. It was also noted that the queue of waiting commuters stretched up Parklands Avenue near the Kara Street intersection, making it difficult for pedestrian traffic to pass the interchange. The data demonstrates that although there is a total of 59 scheduled bus services to the Sydney CBD passing through the Lane Cove Interchange in the morning peak, the number of commuters at the Lane Cove Interchange exceeds the available capacity of the passing buses. The data also shows that some of the scheduled buses which pass through the interchange do not stop due to being full. A suggestion of how to address this issue would be to schedule a small number of services to commence from the Interchange, to provide capacity to clear the queues, particularly around 8am.
ITC met with the office of the Minister for Transport last year and was told that Transport for NSW would not put any more buses into the city as the aim was, in fact, to have fewer buses clogging up the system.
ITC applauds the Lane Cove Council’s step to start lobbying the government for more peak hours’ services, however:
- Writing a letter to Anthony Roberts and Minister for Transport will only result in a standard form letter coming back saying there are adequate services. ITC and ITC followers have several of those letters. (if you want to see the standard response click here) What is needed is face to face meetings with the Minister for Transport and an action plan to follow up on these meetings. Many times (particularly on road safety matters ITC has been told by the Lane Cove Council that they are still waiting on a response to their letter).
- The other problem Lane Cove residents face is the overcrowding on buses departing the city. This issue also needs to be addressed.
The Lane Cove Council is discussing transport issues at their April 10th Meeting and ITC suggests that as many Lane Cove Bus Commuters as possible attend that meeting to express their dissatisfaction with the current services and request the Lane Cove Council have face to face meetings with the various government departments.
