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