Page 150 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2006
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they know that the next bus is going to be 55 minutes away. What do you do in a city like Canberra where it is so easy to drive? You take your car.
Also, I feel that the government is having it both ways by saying that it will put in this special bus road—let’s call it a road, because that is what it is, another road—that can be converted to light rail. To me, it is having it both ways. I believe that if Canberra is to survive as an inland city—first of all, if it is going to become a sustainable city—in an era of oil shortages, which are now an accepted fact, and enforced greenhouse gas reductions, which will come, it will need a successful public transport system that is a mix of bus and light rail. We have at the moment a federal government that will not commit to greenhouse gas reductions, but I believe that the situation will make it absolutely incontrovertible that we will be accepting them. That may come as a big shock to people if we do not get to it now. We need the responsiveness and the flexibility of buses and the reliability and the cleanliness of light rail on those higher transit routes. So why do we not go there now? I believe that we will be connected to the rest of Australia by fast trains.
Paragraph (3) of Mr Corbell’s amendment touches on that by highlighting the government’s plan to further investigate transit corridors between Civic and Belconnen and Civic and Gungahlin. I hope that this project will lead to an eventual integration of transport planning and general urban planning. But transport is, it seems to me, still treated as an afterthought in urban planning. For that reason, as I mentioned this morning, we support the opening of an office of transport which combines the transport functions of the Department of Urban Services and ACTPLA.
I hope that the ACT government will take a triple bottom line approach when considering whether to go forward with light rail over busways. Mr Corbell’s question about where the power will come from is one that requires answering. I am sure that it can be answered. The information is already out there in the literature. I suspect that it is really up to his minions to find the answer to that for us.
The government’s January 2004 report Canberra public transport futures feasibility study: economic and financial implications of transport options, not surprisingly, found that improving busways was cheaper than having light rail. The findings that the ACT government extracted from this report, not surprisingly, were focused more on the short-term dollars than on the long-term social and environmental arguments. But, if you take the time to read the feasibility study, you will find that the ACT government extracted the wrong information, or perhaps for the government it was the right information for the outcome that it wanted. The best way for me to illustrate that is to read out parts of the report’s final chapter. It states:
This study has identified the future capital costs of the stage 1 (54 kilometres) corridor transit system as either $890 million—
that is a lot of money—
for a light rail or $670 million—
that is a lot of money, too—
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