Transport curfew for Adelaide

Transport curfew for Adelaide

By Liam Mitchell

ADELAIDE — Some suburban transport services are to be dropped and others savagely slashed, according to plans released recently by SA transport minister Frank Blevins.

Unions and commuters are very critical of the proposals, which include:

• An end to all public transport (bus, train, tram) services after 10 p.m. from Sunday to Thursday.

• Weekday train services hourly after 7 p.m., instead of every 45 minutes.

• Abolition of three Adelaide Hills bus services and one northern inter-suburban route.

The government will put the affected routes out to tender and is considering late-night taxi services linked with major transit centres. It says existing late-night services are "poorly patronised" and "horrendously expensive" and account for only 1% of travel.

The cuts came with a sugar coating in the form of decisions to extend Saturday afternoon services to cater for all-day trading, to extend some outer-suburban services and to replace the city's old rail carriages.

The proposals follow a dispute between the State Rail Authority and the Australian Railways Union over staffing levels on suburban trains. The ARU took out a Supreme Court injunction over the STA's violation of an August 1991 agreement that suburban train services should carry a minimum of two staff. The authority had been operating some "low security risk services" with drivers only for some 12 months.

The ARU withdrew the injunction after the STA shut down all services after 7 p.m. because it said it didn't have enough staff.

ARU state secretary John Crossing says the cuts are ill conceived. "The STA seems to think you can just impose a transport curfew on Adelaide", Crossing said.

From GLW issue 43