Page 2902 - Week 13 - Thursday, 23 November 1989
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... the right of local residents to protection will be balanced against the need of other members of the community to use their cars to access town centres.
That is more nonsense. There is no need for a balance here. The two can coexist. There is simply no need for commuters to use residential streets as parking lots. In 1984 the metropolitan policy plan promised this to residents near the town centres, and I quote from page 192:
The amenity of residential areas adjacent to town centres and other employment centres will be protected from the intrusion of car parking by the application of development controls and traffic management measures.
Study after study has reinforced this. Mel Dunn, Nelson English and the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the ACT recognised the problem, as did the original ACT House of Assembly committee and the hundred thousand dollar Loder and Bayly local area traffic management study into Reid and Braddon. We know the solutions, and now they must be implemented. The map in this book simply legitimises commuter parking. Briefing after briefing from the ACT Administration on this strategy has failed to provide a good reason for it.
This motion is based on another study by Nairn and Partners, who originally recommended that parking be confined to Civic. There is now a report, the Civic accessibility study, which will apparently be made available to me shortly. It illustrates how suburbs can be turned into parking lots as a revenue-raising measure. I am happy to make available the leaked pages that I have - pages 14, 15 and 16 of this study - to members to illustrate that the map is simply a revenue raising measure with complete disregard for residential amenity.
Inner city residents are not selfish. They recognise the need for balance and for compromise, but those compromises have been made and it is now time for the Government to uphold its end of the bargain. I quote from the August 1987 Loder and Bayly summary report, the result of literally thousands of hours of residents' time in participation:
The residents of the study area were strongly opposed to any commuter parking in their streets.
(Extension of time granted)
However, a majority concurred with our view that in the short term, for reasons of overall community equity, parking should be allowed on one side only of most streets for a limited period during which structural parking is built.
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