Page 2042 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 June 2018
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dramatically in the last 20 years. This is becoming the biggest preventable cause of disease and premature mortality in Australia.
We need to do something about it. One of the most important things we can do is make sure our city is a walkable city, a city where people do walk, where people use active transport so that everybody has what the Heart Foundation recommends for us all, which is half an hour of active exercise every day. More of course is better.
There is funding for an adopt-a-park scheme and funding for eight micro parks. On top of this, the government’s ongoing better suburbs consultation is building the foundation for next year’s city services participatory budgeting trial that I called for last year in the Assembly. The Assembly in its wisdom passed a motion calling for this.
I will now talk about a few of these items in a bit more detail, focusing on the smaller elements which will be of particular interest in my electorate. Ms Cheyne talked about Ginninderra. Not being quite as au fait with Ginninderra, I will concentrate on Woden and Murrumbidgee.
First, there is light rail stage 2 funding. Part of that is restarting work on the Woden bus interchange. For those members who unfortunately do not go to Woden very often, the interchange is well past its use-by date. It is stuck out the back next to the loading zone for the mall, a vacant site which used to be the police station and a multistorey car park.
At night it does not feel particularly safe, although I believe it is. In fact ACTION has staff there until the last bus arrives, but people do not see those staff. It does not look like that. Unfortunately, the buses are required to go in and go around in a circle before they go out again. In peak time this can lead to a minute or two delay. This is a delay that we should not have.
There have been several attempts at getting a new bus station over the years. Probably about six years ago, I was involved in an awful lot of consultation about it. At that stage Westfield wanted to expand and the deal was going to be that they expanded the mall. As part of that, the bus interchange would be reworked and expanded.
I guess it would have ended up somewhat similar to what happened in Belconnen. But unlike Belconnen, the mall has not expanded and the bus interchange has continued to quietly decay. It is really good to see that this is back on the radar. It looks like this overhaul will be happening soon as part of the light rail project.
Secondly, I want to highlight a particular piece of active travel infrastructure in my electorate which appears to have been funded and will be of great interest to cyclists in Woden and Weston Creek. Page 166 of budget paper 3, under “better infrastructure for active travel”, includes the following little snippet of text:
… complete the Lyons to Weston Creek (Heysen Drive) cycle-path link.
I am afraid that all the members listening to me in the chamber have the misfortune of not being Murrumbidgee members. But if you were a Murrumbidgee member you
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