Page 2220 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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find in other cities.” But as the opposition has pointed out a lot recently, we have gone, over the life of the Stanhope government, from a time when it took us 20 minutes to get to work in the morning—it did not matter where you lived in Canberra, pretty much, you could get to work in 20 minutes—to the stage that travelling time has at least doubled. And that is not reasonable for the people of the ACT.
Of course it does not stack up in terms of what people might experience in Sydney, Melbourne, New York or London, but that is nothing to be proud of. We have doubled our commute time to work, for most people in the ACT. The great saviour of this was supposed to be the Gungahlin Drive extension. I said to officials a few weeks ago, “Around Aranda, it is pretty crook, but the Glenloch interchange is pretty good.” Those choke points have moved and now the Glenloch interchange every morning is a disgrace.
I had a conversation with my husband about two weeks ago. He rang me and—
Mr Barr: This is your actual husband?
MRS DUNNE: This is my actual husband, yes, the one I have been married to for 28 years. He rang me to say that there was a bit of a problem. He had undertaken to take our son to school. It was 20 past 9 and he still had not managed to get him to school, although he left home at a quarter past 8. Because the congestion was so bad he eventually had to go into Civic, find a place to turn around on Parkes Way and come back through Lady Denman Drive to have any show of getting him to school on time. And he was still running late. This was a normal Friday morning two weeks ago.
There was a time this week, on Tuesday morning, where you could not move on Parkes Way. I had people waiting. I had made appointments. I had allowed plenty of time to get to the place of my appointment and I was running half an hour late. And it is not reasonable that someone in my position makes a commitment to meet someone, makes a reasonable effort to get there, and gets stuck in these choke points. The choke points are substantial. They are substantial in Aranda, where all the south-bound traffic has, at three places, to converge into one lane, while the north-bound traffic has two and sometimes three lanes. I wonder how we worked that one out.
Then we have, getting onto the Glenloch interchange, the congestion of the GDE itself converging with the traffic from William Hovell Drive, converging with the south-bound traffic on the Tuggeranong Parkway—three choke points where two lanes merge into one, then another two lanes merge into one and then another two lanes merge into one, and the traffic just backs up and backs up. It is a disgrace that we are in this situation. It is a disgrace that, when this road was originally planned seven years ago, it was two lanes in each direction and that there was capacity for all of these things.
Mr Barr: I take issue with you on the choke points. Parkes Way is the problem now.
MRS DUNNE: If there are choke points, you actually have to create the capacity for people to merge at a reasonable speed, and you are not able to do that when you are constantly taking two lanes and squashing them into one, and then you take two lanes
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