Page 5341 - Week 14 - Thursday, 19 November 2009
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here in the ACT. I have met with him and heard his ideas for Canberra. They are well worth hearing about and well worth investigating. Hopefully, we can take on a few of his ideas to make Canberra a more pedestrian-friendly city.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (3.38): I would like to thank Mr Stanhope and Mr Coe for their useful contributions to this topic. I am very pleased to find that we all are in furious agreement that it is an important area and something which Canberra can do better at. The reality that 13 people died on our roads last year and 500 were injured is not satisfactory. And 500 injured would be an understatement. I assume that would only be the people who went to hospital or maybe required police reports, because the actual rate of transport-related injuries would be a lot higher than that.
I also, of course, would like to thank Ms Bresnan for her presentation on this topic and second everything she said, in particular the context that transport makes up 23 per cent of the ACT’s greenhouse gas emissions. We need to look at changing that and some of the modes of transport which we need to prioritise because of that, like walking and cycling, which are the ones that leave people more vulnerable.
Our city needs to change. I agreed with Ms Bresnan when she said we need to go on a road diet. I also agree with the government’s submission on light rail, which said that Canberra’s existing transport system is not sustainable from an environment, economic and social perspective and is already imposing significant costs on the ACT economy and society.
I would like now to mention a few other things apart from those mentioned by the three previous speakers. Firstly, and probably given where we are most importantly, we need to have a change of attitude from those in power—from ACT Roads, from transport, from the Legislative Assembly. Transport development needs to be focused on people, not focused on motor vehicles. At the heart of everything from a transport point of view are pedestrians—we all walk. At a recent New York walking conference it was said that what we need is more footprints and less carbon. I think that is an absolutely great slogan.
Secondly, we need to reclaim space for the community. About 25 per cent of the landmass in Canberra is covered by roads. That is extraordinary. In the 1960s, Copenhagen was as congested with cars as any other city. Then the council noticed that the community had started using a decommissioned parking lot for community activities—markets and community gardens. The city let them keep this space and then instituted a policy to decommission a parking lot every year. The people-friendly policies grew and the community embraced them and the space that had previously been closed to them. Today, as people would be aware, it is probably the walking and cycling capital of the world.
One of the ways of reclaiming space is through a concept called shared space. Shared spaces remove the traditional segregation between motor vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and the traditional controls, such as signs and traffic lights. The result is an environment where car drivers do not have priority; it is a space shared by all users of the street—cars, cyclists and pedestrians. Bendigo has got some very good examples of that, and we also have some examples that partially do this in Canberra. The ANU near the union does some aspects of this, as does the space by the old portrait gallery.
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