Ms Anne Graham:

I spoke earlier about how we prioritise service delivery. Rather than it being about infrastructure, it is more about how we choose to provide new services where there are no services currently. We are trying to develop a methodology to give us some means of prioritising the service provision side. That work is under way currently but it will very much have a social aspect in terms of assessment and not only a cost aspect and the number of passengers that may be derived from that service.

We are very much focused in particular on those areas that would require access to public transport to improve their economic activity as being a core part of the delivery of public transport services, especially when State money is subsidising those services. That would be a core part of that analysis. It is really updating the methodology we have, which is a social-benefit methodology that we used more in the bad times when we were looking at reducing services. We hope we will not be in that position again. We now want to use it in terms of a growth scenario where we want to grow services across the country. We will use a similar type of methodology to prioritise service delivery.

In terms of the gender aspect of service planning, it is something that is included, in particular in bus services planning where a key part of BusConnects was ensuring that people get to more places more easily. Even though there was a bit of a negative response to this, part of that was about integrating the bus services so that one could ensure that one could make those shorter trips a lot easier by introducing more orbital routes so that one could get to more places quicker. That certainly benefits those shorter trips that women tend to make in their care-giving role. The gender aspect is very much included as part of the service delivery. In earlier years in transport planning one focused primarily on the work commute as the driver of in-service planning, but now we look much more across the whole day and at how services are used not just for access to work and education but also for social activity as well because a higher percentage of trips are made for retail and social activity than for access to education and work.