Page 3428 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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transport more sustainable and creating a city and a transport environment that will serve us now and into the future. We cannot continue to have a short-term view and approach.
I recently released a document on transport priorities. In that document I presented some analysis of the costs that a city and its residents face when a city is planned solely around car travel. These are costs to the community both in monetary terms and in social wellbeing. There are ongoing costs such as wasted land, urban sprawl, social exclusion and pollution.
By planning a city that expects and relies on car travel, the ACT government locks Canberrans into car ownership and into paying the ongoing high costs of owning a car. The approximate average time that a resident of Canberra has to work in order to pay for their cars is 550 hours a year, or 1½ hours every day of the year. These figures are based on average Canberra incomes, meaning that many Canberrans must work even longer than this just to pay for cars.
Recently Mr Coe has made clear his beliefs on how transport should work in the ACT. He has attacked the provision of bus services in the ACT, apparently making the argument that ACTION services should be slashed because not enough people are using them. He has been loudly disagreeing with the fact that the community subsidises our bus network. To quote Mr Coe:
… ministers have been absolutely unwilling to step up and make the courageous, tough decisions which need to be made about ACTION rather than simply continuing the status quo. It is simply not sustainable. … Only eight per cent of Canberrans are getting on ACTION buses, yet we are spending $80.9 million.
A real government would ask how they can make that $80.9 million go further, how they can reduce that so they have more money to put into other areas of government, or how they can return it to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts or cuts to other fees and charges. Instead, this government do not want to make those tough decisions.
This sounds to me like a call to take the tough decision and cut the provision of bus services. If that is the Liberals’ position, they should be very clear about that. But they should also acknowledge the impact that this would have on the community, on people who cannot drive, on elderly and disabled people who rely on buses, as well as the future transport patterns of our city.
Ms Le Couteur gave some very personal examples of people relying on other modes of transport. I have had many constituents tell me about their cases. One in particular is a person who relies on a motorised wheelchair, does not have access to a car and has found wheelchair accessible taxis unreliable. They live in Tuggeranong and rely on public transport but have to organise their days around accessible buses when they are available. This still means, however, that they and their carer typically still have to travel a reasonable distance, not on a bus, home from the Tuggeranong town centre.
The Greens do not agree that we should slash our bus services in order to provide tax cuts or fee reductions. Communities subsidise public transport services because they provide a service for the whole community. They give transport options to older
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