Today PTCBR is excited to release “Customer service & public transport in Canberra“, a report examining the passenger experience when using Canberra’s public transport and how it could be improved.
The idea for this report came to us in late 2025 when we realised that most of our advocacy work focuses on operations, infrastructure, and funding – with much less attention going to communications, user experience (UX), design, and other elements of public transport that are perhaps more difficult to analyse than something like, for example, service frequency, because they can be a little abstract and often need deeper consideration than things that can be measured and discussed quantitatively.
At the heart of this report is the idea that it’s vital to consider how passengers feel when using public transport and to ensure they fundamentally feel positive when interacting with any part of the system. We have put forward three “positive passenger principles”: passengers want and need to feel respected, confident, and valued when using public transport. With this in mind, we’ve examined various parts of the Transport Canberra service offering and put forward observations and recommendations for improvements in a range of areas.
Our thanks to all the PTCBR members who provided thoughtful input to this report, and a special thanks to Kyle Hanley who designed and formatted the report. We would like to acknowledge the many excellent public transport agencies out there that we’ve turned to for inspiration and examples of best practice; we especially love the passenger-focused conceptual work done for the Sydney Metro City & Southwest Chatswood to Sydenham line, found in the Design Guidelines document for that project. Thank you also to everyone who participates in discussion about public transport in Canberra, whether it’s online, in the media, at work, at coffee shops and pubs and markets and everywhere else – we are always paying close attention to what’s being said across the city about public transport, and we take it all on board as we advocate for a better system.
We have deliberately taken a collaborative approach in developing and sharing this report – we let then-Transport Minister Chris Steel and Transport Canberra know our intentions to produce it, and then provided the report in late May for private consideration before we released it publicly. After the mid-year cabinet reshuffle, newly appointed Transport Minister Tara Cheyne approached our report with great enthusiasm – we thank her and her team for such a positive response. We also thank officials at Transport Canberra and the City and Environment Directorate for engaging deeply with our ideas and suggestions and proposing ways to action our recommendations. PTCBR looks forward to ongoing discussion and collaboration as we collectively work towards a better public transport network.
You can read and download “Customer service & public transport in Canberra” below, and you can also find our media release below.