Cara Jenkin: Adelaide Metro’s bus services fail commuters who don’t work 9-5

WILL you ride on an Adelaide bus today and are you happy with your service? Cara Jenkin isn’t. She has given up. POLL: Rate your bus service. COMMENT: Share your ideas.

STATE Government, you win. I’ve tried to use public transport to commute to work, I really have. Now, because I don’t work nine to five, I’ve given up.

Ever since I started working odd hours at The Advertiser 12 years ago, I’ve made a concerted effort to get my car off the road and get myself on a bus – or train – to commute from my home in Adelaide’s northern suburbs.

But you just keep on throwing up roadblocks.

First it was reducing bus services to my place. I had, wrongly, presumed the goal would be to put on more bus services, not fewer.

Granted, two new routes were put on at the expense of two that were taken away, but one stopped running from the city at 6pm, the other at 7pm.

What’s the use of that if I finish work at 7.05pm? It’s a long walk home or a very expensive taxi ride each night when you live where I do.

So I started driving to the Klemzig station on the O-Bahn, where buses run about every 20 minutes until midnight. That worked for a while, until every car park was filled with commuters by 8.45am.

Where was I supposed to park when I started work at 10am or later?

O-Bahn buses at the Paradise Interchange. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

I switched to Tea Tree Plaza, where a four-storey, 650-space car park had been built. That worked for a year. Now I’m back to square one because you can’t get a park there after 8.45am either.

There was a spillover car park on Smart Rd but that’s been sold as the site for a retirement village.

The upshot is that no commuter who wants to use the O-Bahn from TTP or Klemzig after 8.45am can find a park – and spaces run out even earlier at Paradise.

How would you improve your bus service? Use the comments section at the bottom of the story to share your ideas.

Not that this is just a problem on the O-Bahn, or with buses. I can’t get a park at train stations near my house in the mornings either.

The other problem is the bus stops running from them after 6pm, so even if I did catch a train, there’s no way to get home in the dark.

So I can’t catch a bus into the city after 9am, and I can’t drive to a bus or train because there are no car parks – or connecting services to get home.

It’s all very well and good to improve infrastructure by extending tram lines, electrifying rail lines and building car parks, but when you can’t get on public transport to start with – outside of 9am to 5pm – what’s the point of it?

Frequency after 6pm hasn’t changed for at least a decade.

There are too few car parks at bus and train park ’n’ ride facilities reserved for people who need to leave their vehicles after 9am.

You’d think that’s exactly who these park ’n’ ride facilities are meant for – people who need to access public transport and don’t want to take their cars into the city, regardless of the time of day.

In my opinion, the whole public transport system is designed for office workers in the city with little regard for those who need efficient services outside of nine to five.

If you’re a pensioner hoping for a day trip into the city or Glenelg, forget about getting close access to a bus or train – or not having to make multiple changes. The same goes for people attending medical appointments and students going to uni.

It’s probably a good thing they’re building a special bus track down Hackney Rd that makes room on the road for more cars. Maybe that was the plan in the first place.

In the meantime, it looks like I am going to be driving to work for quite some time yet.