Lisa White, Harcourt
Dear Maree Edwards MP,
Just following up the election promise of opening the Harcourt train station. Has there been any progress on this?
This would make a huge difference to me and my family’s life. It would provide my family with more opportunity to contribute further to the community and provide us and everyone else in this community the basic right to have ease of access to jobs and education.
The existing bus service from Harcourt to Castlemaine, that only goes three times a day on weekdays, does not align with any V/Line trains, basically making this service unusable for most people. It seems to only benefit seniors who need to do shopping in Castlemaine or get to appointments etc. This bus service appears outdated, considering the fast population growth of Harcourt and also the demographic change.
In the interim, I would suggest advocating to get the bus times changed to align for commuter and student purposes – considering a lot of people are unable to drive to Castlemaine Station from Harcourt – to get to popular destinations such as Melbourne or Bendigo. Another innovative idea would be to build a concreted bike track along the train line from Castlemaine to Harcourt, as currently the highway is very unsafe, the back way makes it much too long to ride and is not suitable for riding bicycles. This would also increase the tourism of Harcourt and would link perfectly with the new Mountain Bike Park (La Larr Ba Gauwa Park).
It is a huge economic burden in our family to run cars and thus keeps us within economic disadvantage, especially because we want to continue contributing to the workforce, it only creates an extra barrier to get to work, to then therefore pay for our car expenses.
Ineffective public transport is a waste of taxpayer money and disproportionately disadvantages single-parent families and people/families on low incomes, to be able to contribute to the workforce and access education.
