Page 3033 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 October 2022
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The second lot of census data came out yesterday. We have not had a chance to look at it thoroughly yet, but a couple of stats caught our eye. We saw that, of the 15,611 people who travelled to work via public transport on census day, around 42 per cent caught light rail. That is pretty surprising. That is an astonishing rating from the people who are using that service. We only have light rail in one region of Canberra, and it is already almost half of our public transport use. That is a very successful public transport project.
Of course, every district of Canberra needs access to the best quality public transport system. Out in Belconnen, we have a long wait for light rail. We will be very excited to see it, but it will be a while. We need to make sure that our buses are performing at that same standard, to complement light rail. It needs significant investment in expanding those services and electrifying the fleet to make sure that we can do that.
It is good to see that the raising of London Circuit has begun. That will enable works for the alignment of light rail 2A and it will improve the walkability of central Canberra. We hope that it makes the middle of Canberra look a little bit less like a highway and a little bit more like a city centre, which would be great. Possibly these works should have been done a long time ago, while we were building light rail 1. We would like to see enabling works like this for future stages to be done, rolled out and prioritised, whilst we are building the rest of light rail, so that we do not have such long delays and such staggered delivery on this major, city-shaping project.
I welcome the completion of the Woden interchange. I cannot wait to see light rail roll into that interchange. I am pleased to see that the procurement of a new ticketing system to replace MyWay is coming soon. Hopefully, that will bring us into line with other jurisdictions where you can pay by credit or debit card. That will be much more convenient.
It was good to see Whitlam’s bus service start this year. It was fantastic news; we called for that, and it was great to see it come about. It is a shame that our planning in Lawson meant that they were without a bus service in the suburb for a long time. Particularly given the layout of that suburb and where they are located, they really would have benefited. We are glad to see that that is coming now.
We would like to see a bit of a change in the way we do this. It is important that, on day one, when people move into a suburb, they have good active travel connections and good public transport access from that first day. If they do not, they will tend to go out and buy a car. They might be driving that car for another 15 or 20 years. They might have made school and job choices based on that pattern of travel. So it is much better if we can do it from the very start.
We are looking forward, hopefully, to getting a lot of people switching back onto the bus in Lawson and Whitlam. Once we have stage 2 progressing, maybe local shops, and direct access to Aikman Drive and the Belconnen town centre, a lot of those journeys can be made without a car.
The Greens would also like to see a much more rapid transition to a fully zero emissions bus fleet. Ideally, we would like to see that by 2030. That would be in line with the seriousness of the climate crisis, and that is what we called for in our original
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