Page 1184 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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intention around the airport road and Pialligo Avenue through Morshead Drive. Whilst the construction phase is on, that is a terrible place to ride your bike, but consider what it will be like when it is finished. It will be a particularly useful facility for people wanting to go to work at Brindabella business park. It is an automatic part of the thing.
I, for one, as a former Minister for Urban Services, a former Minister for Territory and Municipal Services and a former deputy chair of the standing committee we are speaking of, feel reasonably qualified to express a view. I do not appreciate the innuendo that Mr Coe comes out with about TAMS’s lack of ability to consult. I do not appreciate that at all. I just think that it is the sort of knee-jerk, populist, sensationalist garbage that we normally would expect.
Mr Coe: They could be doing their work, John.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Coe!
MR HARGREAVES: The thing is, he cannot resist it, Madam Deputy Speaker. It takes me three words to stoke Mr Coe. Three words and two seconds.
Mr Coe: I’ll happily take that criticism.
MR HARGREAVES: There you go. Madam Deputy Speaker; Mr Coe can happily take whatever he likes, particularly his leave from this place! But let me say this: I confess a slight disappointment that the issue has not been picked up by the standing committee, because, as a member of the opposition between 1998 and 2001 and a member of the government backbench after that, I can remember receiving a goodly number of representations from people who wanted to have speed bumps put in their streets. People wanted to have chicanes put in their streets, and I have to tell you that I am an absolute and unashamed opponent of chicanes. I think they are the most dangerous traffic calming measure that has ever been invented. I do not like the little speed bumps either, but I do like the larger ones; I think they are particularly effective.
For those who live in the Tuggeranong Valley, a trip along Langdon Avenue will show you how effective they are. I was asked to put that speed bump in, even though I was not a member of the executive at the time. I lobbied the government of the day and had it installed, and it was outside a primary school. Notwithstanding the 40-kilometre-an-hour speed zone there, people were not observing it. So it is a bit of an issue. I introduced quite a number of road safety measures across the ACT, and we can do it again. The department certainly has the resources to do these things, but I think there would have been a bit more of a community commitment to the outcome if it had come from the Assembly.
One of the criticisms that I faced when I was Minister for Territory and Municipal Services—whether it be speed cameras, fixed and mobile, whether it be traffic calming measures, whether it be 40-kilometre speed zones around schools, whether it be the lack of them around childcare centres, or whether it be the 50-kilometre-an-hour default speed limit and the lack of signage in some people’s minds—was that these things were imposed on them by the department, by some
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