The vast majority of public bus services continue to be run, despite transport officials contending with significant staff shortages and an outbreak of COVID-19 among drivers.
Transport Canberra has run 99.72 per cent of services as planned on weekdays in the last month, figures provided to the The Canberra Times have shown.
Over the last month, an average of just 12 services have been dropped each weekday from a timetable of 4536 services, which includes school runs.
Twenty-seven services have been dropped on average for each weekend day over the last month, out of a timetable of 1727 services on Saturday and 1184 on Sunday.
On Friday, May 19, there were about 60 drivers off work in COVID-related absences - double the usual amount of drivers off as a result of isolation requirements - which prompted transport officials to tell the public services could be affected.
The potential impact of that many drivers away could have been more than 100 services, but extra drivers were called in and only 26 services were dropped that day. The number of drivers off work due to COVID has since declined.
Transport Canberra deputy director-general Ben McHugh said the interim timetable had given enough flexibility to manage ongoing unplanned driver absences while maintaining a good level of service.
"Although it's a small percentage, it only has to impact one person for it to be problematic," Mr McHugh said.
"When we start to communicate that we're dropping services, even though those numbers might not be we're dropping 10 per cent or anything like that, we still want to get the comms out there for people to go and check the journey planner to tell them if their bus is running - because there's nothing worse than waiting at a bus stop for a bus and it doesn't show up."
Mr McHugh said Transport Canberra prioritised maintaining services for vulnerable people and then services that moved the most people.
"The focus of that shift replacement is children first. So we fill all of our school services as a priority," he said.
"We then fill as many of the known normal route services as we can, that we know carry students. We've got good data where we know we've got high volumes of students that jump on the route services, so make sure we fill those shifts. Then you work down through your rapids and your local services from that point."
The interim timetable dropped about 200 services each weekday.
The timetable was first modified during the lockdown in August last year and again from January 31.
"We've been managing reliability, I think, fairly well during COVID and the interim network really bought us that contingency to make sure we didn't drop a lot of shifts, but it does go to show that COVID is dangerous for service delivery businesses like ours if there's an outbreak," Mr McHugh said.
