This week I had the strange experience of filling out a survey on board a route 100 bus from Taronga Zoo to City QVB; getting on at Spit Junction and getting off at Wynyard. We were told on board the bus that this was to help improve the service, I think that this is actually just ruse before the whole region is privatised.
Late last year the cotracts for the Sydney Bus Regions 7, 8 and 9, that this the northwestern suburbs, northern beaches, and eastern suburbs, were all marked for privatisation and handing over to private operators between November 2020 and the end of the year. That hasn't happened presumably of because the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic but given the Liberal Party's proven track record to hand over government services to their criminal friends for a peppercorn (which is why Sydney Ferries is a subsidiary of Transdev Australasia) it looks like it will happen at some point in the future.
I can already blame the then Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian for her abject refusal to connect the North West Metro to the Richmond Line, for her part in the process which gave Hillsong Head Office its own Metro Station while being practically inaccessible to the suburb of Norwest which it is named after; so this just looks like more of the same. The current Transport Minister Andrew Constance used to work as a lobbyist for industry bodies and was parachuted into a safe seat with which he had no connection on the basis that he was the former President of the Young Liberals. I suspect that he has been employed to deliver infrastructure projects to Liberal voting areas before flogging them off to his mates. Both he and Gladys will probably both go the way of former Premier Mike Baird who jumped ship to join the NAB.
I have been told by some of the drivers (yes I speak to bus drivers) that they were allowed to look at a document which had the suspicious looking stamp of "sensitive" on the outside and it said that everyone who wasn't directly employed as a driver, which includes all admin, finance, and scheduling staff, everyone who maintains the fleet, all of the cleaners, would not be guaranteed to retain their job when there was a new private operator.
I suspect that I am a victim of blind A/B testing; where the bus services are being deliberately made worse, to test the bottom limits of people will accept. The 100 bus operates as an "all day" service with no real time table, the B1 bus also runs on this basis and they have decided to run fewer buses. Running fewer buses is fine from an operational point of view because it reduces costs but if you are waiting for a bus on the second to last pick-up stop on the route, then seeing buses with "Sorry Bus Full" signs on them are not helpful. One day last week, I had to wait 36 minutes for a bus to arrive which wasn't full. I have a big black scary coat and so I am fine when it is 8°C and windy but when it is 5°C and raining, it is unpleasant.
Normally if you had to wait 36 minutes for a bus, then I would either think that you were waiting for a long distance service, or a service in a suburban/semi-rural area. Buses from Sydney to Melbourne might run once or twice a day. Buses in suburban/semi-rural areas are more likely to run on a half hour service; so a bus being 6 minutes late might not be a problem. I live in a suburban area and so waiting for a bus for half an hour is not an unusual thing, however this is a photograph of what in theory is just seven kilometers away from Wynyard Station.
There has existed a thing in tory politics for so long that it makes me wonder if it is a guiding principle. Obviously the people who fund tory politics and the political machines therein want to act as if they have no responsibility to the nation or society whatsoever but politics is the art of the enactment of policy; in this case denying and abrogating any responsibility that you might have to the nation and its people, then metastasises into actively destroying the assets which are held in common. In Australia at least, the perpetual slogan of the Liberal Party (which has now abandoned the pretense of being in favour of liberal democracy) should be "Defund, Degrade, Destroy, Privatise." Of course if there is a collective action problem which comes along, then the same people who demand that kind of policy are all only too happy to then demand a public bail out when it all turns to nonsense.
I suspect that Andrew Constance will say that privately-run buses will be better able to stick to the timetable or other such nonsense. Andrew Constance as MP for Bega and who almost certainly doesn't actually live there, seems to deny reality itself because no buses, either public or private, can outrun the swirling conurbation that is traffic within the five million souls of the metropolis of Sydney. Timetables aren't set by Sydney Buses but by the State Government and the Ministry for Transport and Roads itself. Private operators as private business always have the prime incentive to cut costs and reduce service standards in order to extract profits from the public. Transport choices tend to be rather inelastic in demand because even when the price changes, even when the level of service is deliberately degraded, we still need to get to and from work. If only there was a responsible Transport Minister.
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