$4.6million to study what we all know about Public Transport

Child Poverty Action cautiously welcomes plan to lower some public transport costs

Yesterday the government announced $4.6 million of this year’s Wellbeing Budget will investigate a scheme to reduce public transport costs for community services card holders.

There are about 900,000 community services card holders in New Zealand.

Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter said they included low-income families, people out of work, some tertiary students and recipients of the disability allowance.

“These are the people for whom the cost of public transport can be a barrier to everyday activities, like making that doctor’s appointment, job interview, after school activities or visiting friends and family,” she said.

Ms Genter said central government and councils would be working together to understand the potential cost of the scheme and how and when it will be rolled out.

The government said the potential sources of funding for the cost of fare concessions are still being explored.

Child Poverty Action Group spokesperson Jeni Cartwright said the scheme could make a huge difference to low-income families.

“If you look at the cost of a two-zone trip for one parent and three children over the age of five it’s about $20 for a round trip and that could a be as small a journey as just going to the supermarket and back, so that’s potentially a huge saving,” she said.

However, Ms Cartwright said the scheme should be outright guaranteed and ideally transport for low-income families would be free.

Yay, $4.6m to study if we should give poor people cheaper access to public transport.

How about I save you $4.5million and say, ‘yes’.

Now give me $100 000.

With the rise of gold card use and the middle classes wanting to get from their villas to the CBD, they haven’t enjoyed the smelly common folk sitting next to them on the train or bus so the gentrification of public transport has been a priority when really free public transport needs to be the goal.

If we are going to have a serious reduction in car emissions, public transport is the solution and to get people out of their cars we need to make public transport free.

Almost $5million to investigate a solution suggests we aren’t asking the right questions.

We need bold plans and visions, we are getting neither.

Still, it could be worse, we could have Wellingtons Bus service!