Page 3860 - Week 10 - Thursday, 27 August 2009
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unit. The Queanbeyan mayor, Tim Overall, and I have resolved to work closely and to ensure that our officials work closely over the coming period so that we can coordinate our activities and develop sustainable transport options that do not stop and start at our borders.
At last month’s roundtable I announced that the government is developing the sustainable transport action plan 2010-16. That action plan will be a detailed policy document setting out how the government will implement the sustainable transport plan in the short to medium term. The inputs from the roundtable will be reflected in the sustainable transport action plan that we are developing over the coming months.
The sustainable transport action plan will consist of four strategies governing how we must move around our city and our region. These four aspects of the integrated transport system—parking, public transport, cycling and walking, and transport infrastructure—require detailed planning and strategic policy thinking.
The four strategies will be prepared alongside the overarching sustainable transport action plan 2009 and will be released with next year’s ACT budget. The parking strategy will draw on work released for public comment in 2007, updated to include input from studies currently underway relating to an integrated transport-supportive parking pricing policy, parking supply options and a parking offset fund.
The public transport strategy will be based on the strategic public transport network plan developed by McCormick Rankin Cagney and will incorporate public comments from consultation conducted in August 2009 through online surveys, bang-the-table discussions and face-to-face workshops.
The cycling and walking strategy will be based on two studies running concurrently from August 2009, both of which will involve community engagement. The first study relates to cycling and walking infrastructure and accessibility in the town centres and major employment nodes, and will produce infrastructure plans for each of the study areas. The second study will review the policy, regulatory and behavioural initiatives that can help achieve greater mode shifts towards cycling and walking in Canberra.
The final strategy under the plan will be a transport infrastructure strategy. This will be based on input from the other strategies and will include an updated road infrastructure forward work program and incorporate appropriate elements of the ACT’s road safety strategy. The transport infrastructure strategy will set out the capital investments to both secure greater mode shifts towards sustainable transport options and respond to capacity constraints in the transport system in the short to medium term.
I encourage all Canberrans to be actively involved in this exciting work. I ask that they think about the value they generally put on things such as cheap and freely available parking, regular and viable public transport, free-flowing traffic at peak hour and greenfield housing developments.
I think we would all agree that one thing is certain: we cannot consider sustainable transport in isolation from urban form. The two are interdependent. Changes to one
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