Review ordered for Westside Bus

Lesleigh Lawrance is sick of waiting for buses.

Rob Williams

TRANSPORT Minister Rachel Nolan has ordered a review of Westside Bus Company with the troubled service again under fire.

The Member for Ipswich said she had been aware for months of problems with Westside, which is contracted to operate the Ipswich bus service.

“We are going to review their timetables in the first half of the year. I’d expect that to take a couple of months,” Ms Nolan said.

“Some of their issues are legitimate. In their defence, their timetable is a bit tight. But buses should be on time; it’s totally black and white.

“We will work with TransLink to make sure Westside gets their timetabling right.”

She said she was fed up with Westside, which continued to attract criticism despite millions of government dollars being spent to prop it up.

“When I became Transport Minister I made it quite clear I wasn’t happy with Westside Buses. I made improving it a priority,” Ms Nolan said.

“In particular I was concerned about their reliability and the level of customer service.

“I believe we have seen some improvement in recent times. The feedback I get is that it’s generally improving.”

A TransLink audit showed Westside was on-time 87 per cent of the time for September 2009, up from 85.2 per cent in late 2008. However, Ms Nolan conceded there was plenty of room for improvement and she was “not backing off the pressure that I, through TransLink, am putting on Westside”.

“TransLink has been down on Westside pretty hard because taxpayers put a lot of money into Westside and I have a very firm expectation that the level of customer satisfaction will improve,” she said.

She said state funding for Westside Buses went up from $12.8 million in 2007-08 to a forecast $14.6 million in 2009-10.

Ms Nolan said the current Westside contract ran out in the middle next year.

LAST April Westside was ranked the second worst bus company in south-east Queensland and it appears little has changed.

Leichhardt resident Lesleigh Lawrance told The Queensland Times she allowed an hour to get from her home to the CBD.

“I volunteer in the Ipswich Hospice bargain centre and the bus I catch in the morning is never on time,” Mrs Lawrance said.

“It’s supposed to get here at 10 past nine and most times it doesn’t get here until 9.45, which meant the 9.10 didn’t arrive at all and the 9.40 was late.

“Every now and then the bus is on time and everyone is shocked.

“If I’ve got a 10am appointment, I’ve got to allow an hour to get in there. I’m five minutes away.”

To make matters worse, she got on the train the other day to find the ticket that cost $1.80 before Christmas was now $2.60.

“I thought, how rude. Paying extra for a bus that’s late most of the time,” she said.

“They’re unreliable and the drivers aren’t particularly friendly, but that’s a different story.

“There are a lot of people around here who don’t have cars – if you catch a taxi into Ipswich it costs $12 – they’re pensioners and they should have at least a semi-reliable bus service.”

Robert Dow of public transport lobby group Rail Back on Track said the Ipswich bus service was “notoriously unreliable”.

“Ipswich is probably the worst-performing service in south-east Queensland,” Mr Dow said.

“With timetables, not enough time is left for turnarounds. There are timetables that have the bus leaving two minutes before it arrives. They need to rework their timetable.

“One problem is the buses don’t match up with the trains. Because they’re so often late, many times it doesn’t make it to the train station to connect with the train people need to catch. Then it has a domino effect all the way.

“Is that an incentive for people to use public transport?

“They just ramped up the price of paper tickets by 40 per cent and Go Cards by 20 per cent. That is meant to pay for 200,000 bus seats. Where are they? Ipswich and Caboolture should be first cab off the rank.

“Ipswich is in the Minister’s electorate and yet we hear all these stories. It’s very odd.”

Westside manager Adam Pulitano is overseas and was not available for comment.