Page 1311 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 23 March 2010
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Our proposal for modification … is to:
• maintain the local car access road;
• move the cycle lane into a separate off-road super cycle path;
• maintain the bus transit lane; and
• remove one of the lanes of car traffic from each direction.
As I said, Ms Le Couteur was very sensitive on this point. How has that worked in Gungahlin? How has it worked to go down the path of just having the one-lane road? Has that been a success? The question for the Greens would be: would it have been a success if only there were a transit lane tacked onto the side? I do not think so. Of course, there are other elements in it where they are seeking to limit the number of car spaces. This is very prescriptive stuff. There is a way to move to sustainability. It does require more density; it does require a discussion about density. But you cannot, without doing all those other things, simply try to force people out of their cars.
What we will have in Molonglo is the situation that we have currently in Gungahlin where people are stuck in traffic for far too long, and the option of public transport, unless you commit to tens of millions of dollars extra, is not going to meet the needs of many of these residents. That is the question they have to answer. If there is going to be this super-duper public transport system which gets everyone in Molonglo to where they need to be and they are happy to get out of their cars, how much will that cost? How many services a day will be delivered and how will it be paid for? (Time expired.)
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.31): I was very pleased to see this matter of public importance come onto the agenda today, because I think it is very timely to be having this conversation. Ms Le Couteur, my colleague, has already covered many of the aspects that the Greens would like to see for the Molonglo valley. She has given an overall flavour. I would like to discuss some issues relating particularly to energy and water use, as well as open spaces and river protection, because these are also key parts of designing a new urban space.
With regard to energy, all new developments provide an opportunity to think about how we want to use energy right throughout our suburbs and our residences. There are many choices we can make about building design, orientation, the organisation of our infrastructure, our transport, the materials we build out of, and the way we generate any electricity that is needed. Of course, our primary aim must be to build efficient suburbs, because we know that building in efficiency at the front end is the smartest way to save money and greenhouse emissions over the longer term.
Ms Le Couteur has already discussed issues associated with building efficiency, but on top of this the Greens’ paper proposes a number of other measures, such as setting aside space for community-level renewable energy generation installations such as localised wind generation or mid-scale photovoltaic installations. We propose the use of energy efficient infrastructure such as street lighting at a suburb-wide level. And we propose integration with energy incentives such as the feed-in tariff and other energy initiatives that are currently being developed in the energy policy.
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