The ACT Government could not have done a better job of alienating a diverse range of community interests with its proposed bus timetable changes if it had tried.
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Pensioners, people with family and friends in the Alexander Maconochie Centre, families with school aged children and commuters hoping to reduce their carbon footprint, all say they will be significantly worse off if the reforms, which would take effect in 2019, proceed.
The Australian National University appears set to lose its bus service all together.
While Transport Canberra's bureaucrats have made the all-too-familiar noises about consultation and taking on board "a record influx of community feedback" the punters aren't happy.
We have seen protests by the elderly, objections about changes to school bus scheduling and a flood of letters to the editor written by people right across the ACT who say their suburb is going to be worse off if and when the new arrangements come into force.
These include many of the residents of the Goodwin Retirement Village near Crace who have said that when the changes take place they will have to walk up to a kilometre to catch the bus.
"That's too much for a lot of older people who are in their 70s, Sue Brudenall, the secretary of the Crace residents committee, said.
If, as we are told, the proposed changes were "guided by the feedback from Phase 1 consultation and has applied a data-driven approach to design a seven day, every day, modern network", the ACT Government needs to explain how it appears to have got this so wrong.
It seems fair to assume that either the consultation process itself was fatally flawed or that the politicians and those making the decisions weren't interested in listening.
A third option is both of these assumptions are correct.
Passengers, it seems, come a distant third behind the unions, who have the power to veto any user friendly schedule changes that may eat into their members' weekends, and the administrative convenience that comes from a streamlined operation built around the shortest distance between two points rather than where the passengers are and where they want to go.
This counter intuitive reversal of what most organisations regard as their optimum business model would seem to have contributed significantly to the poor financial performance of the bus service over many years.
What now needs to happen is for the ACT Government to take some time out to listen to what hundreds, if not thousands of people, have been trying to tell it and then commit to restructuring services on the basis of what the users want.
This is not an unreasonable request given the majority of the negative feedback has come from people who say they have no choice but to rely on the bus to get around.
The government has an opportunity to show it is listening. Whether it takes this opportunity remains to be seen.
