wheel chair buses.in country towns!

[captainch]

Does govt depts. think that all people who use wheel chairs live in big citys!!.............................Noticed ON THE TRANSPORT FOR NSW WEB SITE giving a lot of country towns what have wheel chair buses some have none or bo taxis either & some of these big country towns have NO public transport or taxis some have a community mini bus run by councils, EVEN were I live TOWNSVILLE QLD 2nd biggest city only has a couple of low floor wheel chair buses if you need to use one of their buses you have to book it 2 days in advance! & most of the fleet of bustec low floors are useless as most of the older suburbs in town have no curb & guttering even mums with prams have trouble getting out of the bus & none of the buses have 2 doors on our busy run we still get the old small merc mini buses older people stand bacl hopping the next bus will be a full sised bus & as for desto signs you can't read them or they don't work! We have a huge new housing estate,just down from us been there one year 2 buses a day both school buses in QLD adults can't travel on school buses!so the bus terminates 6kms away in the middle of no-were!So if you live in SYDNEY don't complain about your transport at least you have some Some country towns if you don't have a car you have to rely on friends or neighbours to get you to doctors ect ^ you don't go out at night or week-ends At the present time for me to go to my doctor its $180 return then I have to claim it from dept vetran affairs yey when I lived in N.S.W YOU WENT BY COMONWEALTH CAR FREE but in qld you don't get that till your 80.yet its a federal govt dept.when I went to war I didn't go to fight for qld or n.s.w it was for AUSTRALIA.

[1whoknows]

Nearly all country town services use accessible buses most if not all of the time. The Townsville fleet is one such. It is hardly the bus company's fault if the council doesn't provide the necessary curbing etc to enable it to work properly.

[burrumbus]

The vast majority of country town services carry tiny numbers of adult passengers ,that really don't justify the use of expensive full size low floor buses.Most would only justify the use of Hiaces and Rosas at best.Even in large towns like Wagga and Bathurst the numbers really are taxi numbers.In fact the conversion of many services to Hiaces on more demand responsive type services would probably improve the services for those pax using them.

[tonyp]

The vast majority of country town services carry tiny numbers of adult passengers ,that really don't justify the use of expensive full size low floor buses.Most would only justify the use of Hiaces and Rosas at best.Even in large towns like Wagga and Bathurst the numbers really are taxi numbers.In fact the conversion of many services to Hiaces on more demand responsive type services would probably improve the services for those pax using them.

To the contrary, a lot of the people who use buses in the country are older, mobility-impaired or parents with prams. As I've related in another thread previously, I've actually been on a run where the pathetic low-floor area of a CB80 cargo was overwhelmed with an alignment of the planets in which the bus was boarded by a couple of wheelchair users, somebody with a pram, a couple with walking frames and more elderly who couldn't climb stairs, creating the "mosh pit effect" I've described elsewhere where the stairs to the high floor create a barrier as solid as the Great Wall of China and the crowd is stuck on the low floor!

This created the stupid result of all available places on the low-floor filling up, resulting in standees who couldn't really physically stand (including one who fell into my lap trying to climb the stairs), while all the seats on the high floor were empty. Nobody could really "wait for the next bus" as it was 2 hours behind. In this day and age, the use of low-entry buses (the ones with high floor at the back) in route service are as dumb as. There are RHD fully low floor chassis starting to appear on the local market , such as the Scania N series, the industry just needs to get with it.

Again as I've said elsewhere, this will also have benefit for heavily-used city route services as, again, the high floor creates a barrier to passenger flow and distribution, even with fit passengers. As to the argument that people like sitting high up the back, the seats are still high in a low floor, it's the aisle (gangway) that's stepless.

Hiaces and Rosas are useless for accessibility and there's not that much saving in the operating cost as the same one driver is still required whatever the size of the vehicle.

[3805]

Hi tonyp.

Sadly the mentality towards public transport in this country is stuck in the dark ages. I remember going through Eastern Europe in the dark old communist era days and even back then their public transport was light years ahead of anything Australia had to offer. Even sadder is the fact that we still persist in going backwards rather than forwards. Europeans beat Australia at everything that the average Joe Blow wants from public transport; cleanliness, punctuality, simple and cheap fares and accessibility. In stead we are given new logos and name changes every few years, new signage that confuses, management that have no idea about public transport and constant penny-pinching cutbacks that does very little to encourage the use of services.

Keep up the fight and keep on telling them the way it is.

[circleroute]

Yes .. pretty much true regarding Australia being way behind Europe in many ways - especially regarding Transit. But it's worth bearing in mind that if Australia had densely populated cities like Europe, then our urban transport system would mirror theirs and be maybe a tad better. It's all about numbers of passengers using such transport - so if there's bugger-all passengers in our spread-out and low density cities then where's the $$$ gonna come from (low population and therefore low tax revenues to provide European-style transit systems? I don't think so). Quite frankly, any household in most parts of our low-density cities would be mad to not own a car AND use it for each and every journey (apart from peak hours in major capitals) compared to European housholds that don't have so many cars per capita due to no space to park it among other reasons - living in tower blocks etc.
It's the same principle I guess when people make comparisons to the massive and high speed rail netwoks and saying "Australia should have high speed rail" ... Lunacy when you take into account the vast distances between cities and towns in Australia compared to pretty much anywhere else and the small population, (and prohibitive cost to build it) together with the fact that we have an aviation system that really is the envy of the world ... again, I say, it all comes down to numbers/population/distance/economics.
Having said the above though, I "get" what the gripe is about our urban and regional transit systems. Sydney probably has the best train system all up, followed by Perth's train and bus infrastructure.


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[Tonymercury]

In fact the conversion of many services to Hiaces on more demand responsive type services would probably improve the services for those pax using them.

I think that you mean 'those pax able to use them', which has a vastly different meaning,