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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 2818 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

reduced in parts of Civic. Workers in the Parliamentary Triangle and in Belconnen do not even pay any parking charges. The growing number of residents in Gungahlin have few direct services to the other towns. The overall trend is to make the ACT even more dependent on private cars.

What can be done about it? A coordinated transport strategy should have the objective of providing transport facilities which are affordable, safe and convenient but which, equally, minimise environmental impacts and impacts on neighbourhoods and are socially equitable. As I said earlier, this is not just about promoting ACTION, although this is important. We need to go back to the basic factors that influence transport choice. The transport strategy must, firstly, be integrated with the planning of the city. Decentralised development in which employment and retail centres are developed in close proximity to residential areas reduces commuting distances and allows greater use to be made of non-motorised transport, such as bicycles and walking. Housing should also be clustered around these centres rather than evenly distributed, so that more people have easy access to these centres. While Canberra's plan has some significant features in this direction, it has been corrupted in a number of ways. For example, the high employment growth of Civic and the Parliamentary Triangle relative to the town centres has generated significantly high levels of traffic flow through Central Canberra.

Looking at transport directly, the Government needs to implement measures that make public transport use more attractive and discourage car use. It needs to take action to manage transport demand, rather than just assuming that we can find ways of coping with increasing levels of traffic by building more roads. Apart from restoring those bus services that have been cut in recent years, the Government needs to take a more lateral approach to meeting people's transport needs. The feasibility of introducing flexible minibus services, or personal public transport, as they are sometimes called, needs to be explored, plus car pooling systems. Bus priority lanes need to be expanded; if buses are going to get caught up in traffic jams, it is essential that they are given their own lanes. Park-and-ride and cycle-and-ride facilities also need to be expanded so that commuters can make the most efficient use of combined transport modes.

One measure that should not be undertaken, however, is the privatisation of ACTION. This will not improve anything. Experience elsewhere indicates that only the profitable routes are maintained and the less profitable routes are cut. As I said earlier, public transport is a public service, not a business. Cycling facilities also need to be improved, for example, through the provision of better on-road cycling and the fixing of some missing links in the cyclepath network. The biggest issue, however, is that car use must be discouraged relative to public transport, otherwise our bus services will always be running at a disadvantage. People need to be made fully aware that the use of cars imposes considerable costs on the community as a whole, through increased pollution, traffic noise and congestion, and the loss of urban space to roads and car parks that are over and above their personal costs of running a vehicle.

There obviously needs to be a thorough review of car parking. Traffic calming measures in the suburbs are also essential to channel cars onto the major roads. A small environmental levy on petrol could also be considered as part of the application of the polluter-pays principle, which could be used to help fund improvements to the public

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