Page 184 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 12 February 2020
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For people who want to walk or cycle along the lovely Lake Ginninderra path network to get to work or facilities in the town centre there is also no reasonable option to get down to that path. Both of these options are obvious on the ground or, I might point out, from aerial photographs such as you can see using ACTmapi. There are several goat tracks where fit and adventurous people cut through Solong Street. At the western end the goat tracks go to the lake and Aitken Drive intersection via a watercourse and electricity substation. At the southern end of Solong Street, people follow a sealed path in the middle of some open space, but then they have to cut down to a little dirt path alongside a block of apartments.
It is far from ideal for a walking and cycling network to require Lawson residents trying to get to work or uni to be fit, adventurous and willing to cross what we hope will be a muddy watercourse, that is, there will be some water around without a bridge. The minister has emphasised that these transport problems are temporary, and I understand that the government’s belief is that when the suburb is finished these problems will be fixed. I am very hopeful that this is in fact the case. But temporary in this case probably means years and years.
People have already been inconvenienced by poor transport options for several years now and it will be several years more before key road and path connections are built. It is not just the inconvenience, which would be one thing, but there are spillover problems, like the parking problems that Mrs Kikkert’s motion raises. There are also problems potentially with injury risk certainly with erosion where people have to walk on the goat tracks and goat tracks get bigger.
There is also the longer term problem for the government for Canberra as a whole, given our ambitions to become a zero net emissions community, because once people get used to their transport habits, they tend not to change them until they move. In Lawson we are actively discouraging a source of transport that the government has said it wants to encourage to reach our climate change ambitions. What we are doing is locking in car ownership and driving habits, which are counter to the government’s goals.
What is the solution? Mrs Kikkert’s original motion addressed only one symptom of the problem: too many cars for the available car parking. Her amendment is better, but still I do not think does it all. I must admit, I was quite surprised at her amendment point (e):
the Government is committed to providing bus services through Lawson once Lawson Stage Two is complete;
It is great to see the Liberal Party announcing government policy commitments, and possibly we do not need to have to worry about the formality of having an election later this year; that is possibly a snide comment.
I do not think that we can tackle problems by addressing only one symptom. If we are going to solve the problems for Lawson, we actually have to look at investing in the transport system in that area and we need to think about what kind of transport system
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