It's hard to imagine now, but Canberra was once a great bus-catching city.
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More than 18 million boardings were made on the bus network in the year to April 1986. That year's census recorded the capital's population as 249,407. More than 11,200 people - 9 per cent of those employed - reported catching public transport to work.
In 2022-23, Transport Canberra reported 17.7 million passenger boardings on the city's bus and light rail network. Boardings reached a pre-COVID peak of 20.1 million in 2018-19. The capital's population has grown by more than 82 per cent since 1986, but bus travel never kept up. About 6 per cent of workers took public transport for their commutes in 2021.
The bus fleet was bigger in 1990 than 2022. But Canberra is a vastly bigger place now than 34 years ago.
The equivalent bus service to my place from the city interchange ran later on weeknights in 1979 than it does now. And it ran more frequently on Sundays then than it does now: every hour instead of two. I'm too young to know this from memory. I have the old timetable to prove it.
Getting the picture?
The bus service in Canberra is, in many ways, a dud. Decades of neglect are catching up with a fast-growing city. The capital's reputation as wholly car reliant is one of the city's own making.
The Canberra Liberals are having another bet that Canberra can once again be a great bus-catching city, offering up a public transport vision that the party believes would expand patronage without the need for expensive light rail.
The party - which has not governed for two decades - is yet to offer granular detail on its plans. It wants to expand the number of drivers, without saying how it can achieve it. The party wants to boost service frequency at weekends, without saying how many buses it believes it will take. The question of getting bus lanes approved by the National Capital Authority is unaddressed.
But parts of the vision are commendable. The city stands to benefit significantly from a better bus network. The city deserves to see the vision's detail thrashed out between now and election day.
If the opposition's pitch sounds familiar, it's because it promised something similar before the 2016 election: an overhaul of rapid routes, increased service frequency, better stops and a bus priority lane on Northbourne Avenue.
But the promise of light rail won out. Now the Canberra Liberals are setting up a rematch along similar battlelines to 2016, against a population that has seen light rail in action for five years.
There's a reason light rail is popular, even if to its detractors that popularity defies rational economic sense. The ride is smoother than a bus. The service runs to the timetable 99 per cent of the time, and so frequently that passengers hardly need to refer to a timetable. It runs late into the night. (Buses run to schedule 77 per cent of the time; the performance target is 75 per cent; venture out at the weekend on a bus without referring to a timetable at your peril.)
Light rail is expensive to build, of course, but over the long term it is cheaper to run. The cost in the ACT is spread out over 20 years of a public-private partnership. The government has done nothing to refute the opposition's claim the extension to Woden will cost more than $4 billion, and instead points to the other benefits, like unlocking land for development.
Mark Parton, the opposition transport spokesman, was telling of the Liberals' position when he said, "The current government's public transport priorities are not about public transport. They're about development. We're about actually providing public transport outcomes."
There is a reasonable case for wanting to build transport corridors that increase the value of surrounding land, the ACT's main commodity, and encourage housing projects.
The government has struggled to quantify these benefits - the Auditor-General, for one, thought they were optimistically expressed in the business case for stage 2A between the city and Commonwealth Park - but can now point to a transformed Northbourne Avenue and say, "See? We told you."
However, there is equally a reasonable case for wanting to improve public transport in Canberra as quickly as possible. Light rail has been electorally popular because, in part, it was the only properly credible solution to dramatically improve public transport. The cost and the long construction period could be stomached because of the good outcome.
The Canberra Liberals now need to convince the public its plan will take the best of light rail - on-time running, frequent services, comfortable travel - and do it with buses faster and more broadly if they are to stand any real chance.
At the very least, it will force Labor and the Greens to outline their plans to improve the bus network. A whizz-bang light rail carriage arriving at Woden in nine years' time is not much use now when you've missed the last bus home from the city on a Saturday night because it left at 10.26pm.