Seven-day rostering for bus drivers remains a key issue in the negotiations over pay and conditions between the workforce and the government, with the government keen to improve service frequency at the weekend.
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Passenger numbers on Canberra's bus and light rail network have recovered faster at the weekend than on weekdays.
Bus passenger numbers at the weekend are now at 75 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, which is a comparison between June 2019 and June 2022.
Passenger numbers on buses on weekdays are 69 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, while light rail passengers have returned to the service even faster.
Light rail passenger numbers are 72 per cent of what they were before the pandemic at the weekend and 71 per cent during the week.
Transport Canberra has embarked on a fresh recruitment drive to boost the number of drivers to ensure it can continue to deliver as many timetabled services as possible.
Transport Minister Chris Steel said the government hoped to increase the number of services, with a focus on weekends, in the future.
"We will need a larger workforce, and we've got a number of other actions that we're taking: enterprise agreement negotiations are currently under way for example, to try and make sure we can deliver those services reliably," Mr Steel said.
Transport Canberra deputy director-general Ben McHugh said the optimum number of drivers at the moment was about 800, noting there were roughly 90 drivers absent for COVID-related reasons each day.
"We're always investigating new ways of rostering and building our workforce to deliver reliability on weekends. Everything, including seven-day rosters, are being considered at the moment," Mr McHugh said.
The ACT government has long sought to require full-time bus drivers work some weekend shifts, but the current agreement means drivers can only volunteer for weekend work.
The issue has long been at the centre of negotiations between the Transport Workers' Union and the ACT government, which runs Canberra's bus services.
Thirty extra bus drivers have been recruited to Transport Canberra since the start of the year, and the bus operator hopes to recruit another 60 by the end of the year.
Mr McHugh said there was always a rate of attrition in the workforce, but the rate had grown during the COVID pandemic as people sought different types of work.
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Mr Steel again defended the government's decision to stick with an interim bus timetable, which reduces some service frequency to accommodate a larger number of drive absences.
The Transport Minister said 99.5 per cent of scheduled bus services continued to be delivered on average in the ACT.
"In other cities, they've taken a different approach. At the end, in the last week of June in our sister city in Wellington, 1100 bus services were dropped. That's a different approach," he said.
"We've decided to prioritise reliability and we'll be continuing to do that with the delivery of an interim bus timetable during term 3. But we're going to use this time to recruit more bus drivers so that when this current wave of COVID-19 subsides, we can start to step up the frequency of services."
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Jasper Lindell
Jasper Lindell joined The Canberra Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
Jasper Lindell joined The Canberra Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
