Tuesday, 18 March 2025

Western Metropolitan Region bus services

David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan) (00:18): (1513) My adjournment is directed to the Minister for Public and Active Transport in the other place. With the federal election fast approaching, politicians have realised that the outer west of Melbourne is one of the country’s fastest growing regions and that its residents are not happy and are eligible to vote. I read recently with great excitement of the $1.1 billion funding announcement to finish an upgrade to the Western Highway between Melton and Caroline Springs, apparently now a key priority for Labor. The federal minister for infrastructure advises that the number of vehicles on that highway will grow to nearly double – that is, 200,000 vehicles per day, hence the upgrade. Huzza, huzza! This is great news – great to see the outer west getting some much-needed attention and great to see that investment in our roads. We need more road infrastructure. Western suburbs residents own on average just under two cars per household because so many live in one of the all-too-prevalent public transport deserts you will find across the region.

The problem is that roads do tend to beget more traffic. Building more roads is guaranteed not to reduce the amount of traffic on our roads. Without sounding ungrateful, I cannot think of a single motorist in the west who is excited by the prospect of 100,000 more motorists being added to the roads they use within five years. On top of that, roads take a long time to build, so any relief is years away. People of the west need transport relief now, not in a decade’s time. So, what about buses? We already have the buses; they are just not being used effectively, with long wait times, unreliable services and tortuous routes that can take hours to get you anywhere. However, we know that a reconfigured bus network would provide public transport to thousands more residents and reduce those wait times to around 10 minutes. Not only would it provide a means to get to work, to school, to shops and to medical appointments, it would also provide tangible cost-of-living relief for households forced to rely on public transport and take some 40,000 cars off the road every day.

CDC manage most of the bus routes in the west. When we raised the possibility of CDC reconfiguring its routes, we were told by the previous public transport minister that it was not possible to even consider upgrading the bus network until CDC contracts had been finalised. Think about that for a moment. Now that those contracts have been bedded down, I ask the minister to provide an update on what is being done to improve bus services and when we will see a comprehensive west and north-west bus reform package.