Two buses have gone past my suburban window in the past three minutes. (In different directions.) Both were virtually empty.
What were they doing? Knitting the social fabric of Canberra together. Without them the carless would have little trade, commerce or social intercourse with the rest of Canberra. They might not be able to get to the polling booth on voting day, for example.
It has ever been thus: empty buses all day; packed ones at peak-hour; and a huge government subsidy. How bad or good is it? How efficient, or inefficient? Until this week we could only rely on the evidence of our eyes. Now we are blessed with the report of the “”Steering Committee of National Performance” on “”Government Trading Enterprises Performance Indicators”.
In the tough world of private enterprise there is little need for the public-sector mumbo-jumbo phrase “”performance indicators”. If you don’t perform you go broke. ACTION will not go broke. It should have long ago, unless you take the view that the public purse should prop it up.
Even if you take that view, though, voters are entitled to demand that the propping up be within reason. Given ACTION does not inhabit the grim Darwinian world of private enterprise, and it survives despite being unfit, some substitutes are needed for the “”fitness” test. Thus the performance indicators and the test of comparison made by the steering committee.
The figures in it were bandied about in the Assembly this week, mostly by the Minister for Buses, Terry Connolly, and the Shadow Minister for Buses, Tony de Domenico. They fought over the steering committee and its indicators as they would over the steering wheel and indicators of a wayward Tuggeranong bus.
I thought it best to go to the report itself. Some 40 pages are devoted to seven government-run city bus networks. Darwin was excluded.
At the outset you’d have to say that even if the ACT came out on top, it would be like saying that conditions in Chad are marginally better than conditions in Somalia, Sudan and Bangladesh. The report, the first of its kind, shows the public capital-city bus services are woefully inefficient. None even returns half what is spent on it.
The report did not provide a comparative table, even though its sole aim was to compare between the states. So I have cobbled one together, choosing what seemed the eight most pertinent indicators. The comparison year is 1991-92 for other states, but I have added the ACT’s previous year for further comparison.
The bottom line is cost recovery. It will be seen that the ACT recovers on 22.4 per cent of its costs, down 1.8 per cent on the previous year and the worst in the country.
We have fewer employees per bus than elsewhere. This could mean we have a lean efficient service, or that we have too many buses. Our high percentage of bus fleet over the maximum daily bus usage might indicate the latter. And it indicates we are not repairing buses quickly enough or we have too many under repair, although economies of scale are a reasonable excuse. We have the lowest kilometres per vehicle per year.
Connolly argues that the deficit on the buses is coming down. And it is, but painfully slowly. De Domenico calculated that the buses are costing each household $540 a year. In other words, the buses chew up more than two thirds the total revenue from rates.
Would it be cheaper and more social just to sell the buses; deregulate taxis (instead of giving the government more than $100,000 per plate sold); permit as many private players who want into the market provided they meet safety standards and send a $540 cheque to each household for the next couple of years till the transport system adjusts itself?
On the social-justice question, De Domenico argues that the buses are largely used by the middle class to get to work and have very low usage anyway. Connolly argues buses are being used widely and it would be socially destructive to cut services. He says school buses are important. He also says that the ACT does not play accounting tricks with subsidised services like other states (by getting one department to “”pay” another so the revenue base looks better).
The steering committee has provided a lot of comparative statistics for these two to throw at each other, especially as ACT Budget time looms. Each indicator is open to interpretation, tough. Politically, the questions are how much are Canberrans prepared to pay for what level of social subsidy for buses; how will they reflect those wishes; and how far can Mr Connolly go in meeting them in the face of a very strong Transport Workers Union? In the meantime, residents bamboozled by the statistics can use the evidence of their eyes.