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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 2 Hansard (5 March) . . Page.. 554 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

Seattle was quite horrified to discover that his second car cost him $85 a week. We never think of it in terms of the on-costs, the depreciation, the running costs, the maintenance costs and the registration costs. We think that we will put 50 bucks worth of petrol in and that's it.

In the process in Seattle, the 23 people in the six-week trial made 200 fewer car trips per week. The 200 fewer car trips per week amounted to 2,030 kilometres fewer journeys and a cut in carbon dioxide emissions of 2,800 kilos over the trial. That is just some of what we can do to help people to create their own seamless transport options.

I think I am becoming quite a fan of the process that Ms Tucker talked about, the autonomous dial-a-ride transit system. It is something that has been around since the 1960s in many forms and it is becoming more automated and therefore more responsive to people's needs. I was looking at one of the articles that I had in my collection about ADART, and it has got a great little summation of what ADART is when it is truly responsive. It says, "The ADART fleet covers a large service area without any centralised supervision. Like an army of ants, the vehicles accomplish their tasks with no-one in charge."

There is no-one in charge except the user who calls up the vehicle that takes the user, within 15 minutes of when they want to go, from their point of origin to a destination. They might be in a taxi, they might be in a minibus and they might be in a microbus, depending on the demand at the time. This is true responsiveness that would get people out of the suburbs and into more mass transit. These are the issues that we have to look at.

On the subject of mass transit, I have to take a little bit of umbrage at something that the minister said in here yesterday. I did not say that light rail would not work. I said that the proposal that was put forward by the minister last week would not work for the reason-I was quoted out of context-that people who have already got in their car to travel to Russell, Parkes or somewhere like that to get to work will not use mass public transport during the day for their intertown trips. They have already parked their cars and they have already made the effort to get out there.

Why I said that I think that it would not work is that it would not address the principal problem that you need to encourage people not to get into their cars first thing of a morning. You need to show people that there is a better, more efficient, cheaper way of getting around, and we have to provide that better, more efficient, cheaper way of getting around so that they will not get in their car of a morning.

The inner-city loop or triangle that the minister proposes would be nice, it would be a good flagship, but in many ways it would fail in what should be its principal objective of changing people's attitude to transport in an integrated way, getting them out of their cars in the morning and onto public transport.

I think that we should not be too hung up with technology. The medium isn't the message. We should be looking at all options and light rail is an option that we should be looking at when we are looking at providing services to the people of Gungahlin, who have sorely missed out, who are always the people who are forgotten in the transport debate. We have had the war about the alignment of the road. That war has been solved;

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