From Waterloo to Broadway – free by bus

People gathered at Poet’s Corner for a free barbie and chatted with other City Councillors, like Tony Pooley, and with Jane Rogers whose South Sydney Community Transport team had done most of the planning.

Local resident, George Nemirovski, quickly anticipated what had been found to be the main benefit of such a free shuttle bus in the Manly Municipality. He believed that it would help people to build community and make new friends as they travelled and chatted together. Chris Bradley from Manly Council, who was there on the day, confrmed that this had been the key benefit revealed in surveys.

Resident Queenie Thompson had several plans for her use of the bus – visiting friends, seeing what extra books she could find in the Glebe Library and avoiding a lengthy two-bus trip when she needed to get to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Fiona Pecherskaja felt the bus would take some cars off the road and give people the chance to help each other and participate more widely in community activities. Everyone was looking forward to having ready access to larger shopping centres, like Broadway, even though the shuttle bus is not specifically a shopping bus.

In launching the bus, the Lord Mayor said that “A survey conducted by SSCT in Glebe also found that key destinations such as the hospital, Glebe Library and the Broadway shopping centre were not accessible to residents there for a variety of reasons – including cost.”

She said that the City of Sydney is pleased to sponsor this pilot project, which has been funded by a Community Services Grant of $33,000 for this year.

The service, which began on February 2, will run from Poets’ Corner via the Fact Tree Youth Centre to Phillip Street, the Commonwealth Bank in Redfern Street, Redfern Station then on to RPA, the Joanna O’Dea housing, Glebe Library and the Broadway shopping centre. There will be three trips a day, starting from Redfern at 8.30, 10.30 and 1.30 and returning from Broadway an hour later. It will run twice a week, on Thursdays and Fridays, as experience shows these are the days of peak demand. The 21-seat bus has been fitted with a fold-down step and extra hand rails to provide safer usage for children and the elderly.

As Clover Moore emphasised, this is a service for old and young and everybody in between. It is a great addition to the life of the South Sydney community and beyond.

Source: South Sydney Herald March 2007