Page 773 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 March 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR DUBY: That meeting is, I believe, due to be commenced this week. The task force will be reporting, I hope, in a short time and I expect it to be quite satisfied and to prove to the community that the measures that we have put in place are superlative; and, if there is room for concern in other areas, by all means, we are quite prepared to take that on and, as a part of the program for schools reshaping, meet the needs of the community in those regards.
You specifically asked just then in an interjection: What about children who are using, for example, the painted traffic islands - or, for that matter, the concrete traffic islands - as pedestrian pathways down the middle of a major suburban street? Frankly, I think the answer to that lies in education. In that regard, my Department of Urban Services has been quite active in the promotion of traffic education, as indeed has the ACT's police force under Mr Collaery, to ensure that the children at primary school - particularly the younger children, the infants - receive an adequate traffic education program at each and every primary school throughout the Territory.
I think it should be pointed out that my department has a dedicated group of professional traffic engineers who attend all major accidents and who research accident statistics to identify problem areas, and they then prioritise corrective action for implementation through our works program. An essential phase of prioritising the works is the use of extensive consultation with residents and with road user groups. The effectiveness of the solutions is monitored by my department both at the design stage of those projects and also regularly after completion. I think the effectiveness of those solutions is demonstrated once again in the extremely low accident records that we have here in the ACT compared to other urbanised parts of Australia.
The general treatment of major roads is in the form of pedestrian refuges which provide a series of crossing points along a road. I think people should understand that those particular painted islands, for want of a better expression, are not to be used as an alternative pedestrian access lengthways along a road; they are simply refuges that people can use as they cross a road. The treatment modifies the road cross-section to provide a single traffic lane, three-and-a-half to four metres wide in each direction. And they are separated by a central median which incorporates concrete pedestrian refuge islands, intersection turning lanes and a slow speed area for passing, stopped or slow vehicles, such as buses, or for turning into driveways.
Indeed, listening to Mr Stevenson's speech on this matter of supposed public importance, I was actually moved to wonder whether the issue of most concern to Mr Stevenson was that of safety for the pedestrians or that of parking
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .