Western Sydney Trasnport Symposium Just Great And Great

Today was my first experience with Western Sydney Transport Symposium, which I have found to be completely interesting, intriguing and also providing a lot of further information than can better our transport community.

WSTUG provided great food throughout the day and we all thank thank Hugh, Amy and Deborah for their assistance in making it a wonderful day.

From our group the following members attended the meeting: Blake,Shayne,Angela, Jacqueline and Pauline. Inclusive of myself the overall representation from our group is a strong representative from our group also which in turn represents a lot of commuters from within the Mount Druitt community.

The total day was relaxing and there was total enjoyment of transport information that I have never heard before especially 'Flexi-bus services' which is a bus service that is looking to be implemented. A bus service that would run 24 hours a day and all you will need to do is book your bus travel one hour before, to be picked up in the front of your door. The cost would be the same as your bus travel tickets. This represented bus planning and the distance gap - Professor Corine Mulley, Chair of Public Transport and Rhonda Daniels,Senior Researcher, Institute Transport Logistics Studies (ITLS).

We also had Vicki Jarvis and Customer Relations Manager - CityRail,'How does CityRail and RailCorp work?' Basically, explained was the complaint process that is used for 131500. What was quashed was that we thought it took 200 complaints to get a resolution - no she advised even one complaint will be looked into.

Thirdly an interesting presentation was made by John Evenden, Access Consultant regarding,'What is important about bus stop infrastructure? Who organises bus stop infrastructure and how is it allocated?'. This topic may have been boring to me many years ago but as we have over 10,500 bus stops around Western Sydney, when we look at each bus stop around Mount Druitt, a majority of them are just bus stop signs. not friendly tot the disabled, vision-impaired or the disable. Some of our bus stops may not be user-friendly; that is no seats for the elderly or disabled and no proper covers. Some bus stops may not even be position properly: shrubs hiding viewing bus arrivals.

In between these topics - we had workshops where we try to explain how we all can communicate these ideas to the community. I thoroughly enjoy the Transport Symposium as I met Glen who is concerned of bus services around South Marayong and I can see that although he has obtained 100 petitions, he feels like he is fighting a losing battle. Personally, I would like to assist him with his goals of restoring buses going through important local communities.

Also I met John, from Sefton Park who has issues with a bus services by-passing a shopping centre - I have asked Blake to assist him but I feel I would like to assist him as well.

My heart feels like there are other community members out there wanting to know how we got pour bus service back - so they can get there back as well.

The 2nd Western Symposium was great and great!