Page 3594 - Week 11 - Thursday, 23 October 2014
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at the Queensland University of Technology have shown that those with the highest levels of car dependency are most susceptible to mortgage stress. Transport costs are now the second highest cost for a Canberra household, primarily because of the costs associated with owning and running cars. Providing quality public transport, and of course starting to plan our city more around public transport, is a way to alleviate future economic stresses for Canberrans.
Light rail does not just bring transport benefits, of course; it responds to challenges that will impact on Canberra’s livability in the future. Climate change presents challenges to our city that we would be negligent to ignore. Motor vehicles produce almost a quarter of our city’s greenhouse gases, not to mention local air pollution. Excessive reliance on motor vehicles can make our citizens and city susceptible to oil price volatility. A smart city will start to build a high-capacity, high-speed and attractive public transport system to help combat these challenges.
As professors McMichael, Stefen, Newman and Norman argued in a recent article, according to the latest IPCC report, a light rail car, powered by low-carbon energy sources, will generate, on a passenger-kilometre basis, only 20 per cent of the emissions of a bus, four per cent of those of a mid-sized car and 2.5 per cent of those of an SUV. Of course being electric, light rail can also run on renewable energy. They also note that, by triggering redevelopment along the transit corridor and at the major stations, light rail can indirectly drive even further emission reductions if the associated infrastructure achieves high energy efficiency standards.
In the next 30 years our population will increase to over 600,000 people, if the demographers’ projections are correct. All these people need to travel around. They all need to live somewhere. Believe me, we do not want all of them using private vehicles and squashing onto the roads. All the warnings are there for the problems congestion will cause our city in the future if we do not take action. Nor would you want all of those people to locate on the fringes of Canberra, extending our urban footprint and, with it, the costs of providing infrastructure and the costs to the environment.
Light rail is a sensible response to this. Light rail on Northbourne Avenue is a sensible response as well. It is the corridor with the most congestion, high-predicted growth, excellent opportunities for quality urban redevelopment and renewal, and of course it is an entry way to our nation’s capital.
One very specific issue to mention about light rail, on the issue of livability, is that light rail is faster, more comfortable, quieter and produces less local air pollution than buses. In a city like Canberra, with our clean air and relatively quiet environment, that is quite a plus. Light rail takes up less space than buses for the number of passengers it carries. This means of course that we save space in the city centres where space can quickly run out and become a premium.
Transport benefits, social benefits, economic benefits, health benefits, environmental benefits—there is a long list of reasons that light rail is an important part of a livable, sustainable and resilient Canberra for the future. It is not surprising, as I mentioned yesterday, that of the top 10 cities on the 2013 Economic Intelligence Unit’s most
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