Page 3424 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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you can get more young people cycling or commuting by public transport to their school, their university or their TAFE, if you can encourage more younger primary school-aged children to cycle or walk to school wherever that is feasible, then that is a good and healthy thing for our community, economically and physically, in terms of people’s health. That is why these policies are important. It is about time in this place we had a more nuanced debate about these issues rather than the simplistic sloganeering we hear from those opposite.
DR BOURKE (Ginninderra) (5.35): I am not supporting Ms Le Couteur’s amendment. Access and parking in our local, group and town centres is an important part of planning for a sustainable and prosperous city. Canberra’s local and group centres are vital community meeting places, providing important social services and amenities.
Our town centres are our key employment centres, and are increasingly areas of mixed use development, residential, retail and office facilities co-located in vibrant shared places. Providing convenient short to medium stay parking with a clear demand management strategy is necessary to allow people to visit a health centre, exchange a library book or do their shopping.
Parking is vital to support the businesses and services in our centres that support the ACT’s strong economy. I spent nearly two decades managing a small business in Canberra. There are some 25,000 small businesses operating in this city and the provision of adequate and well-situated short-term parking is essential to the viability of this economy.
But parking should not be considered in isolation, either from the remainder of the transport system—an integrated approach which Minister Corbell has outlined—or from a sensible, considered land use planning approach to address parking demand at the lowest cost to the Canberra community.
To date, much of the demand for parking generated by the mix of land uses, other than large retail developments, has been met in ACT government surface car parks in all major centres. Some blocks in the city and the town centres which were surface pay parking areas have been sold for development. However, the developments on ACT government-owned surface car parks have been required to replace the existing publicly available spaces.
Options available to increase parking supply include releasing sites specifically for car parks to be developed privately and then either operated privately as private-for-public pay car parks or handed back to government for it to operate. Alternatively, the government may develop multilevel car parks and lease them to companies to operate the parking business or it may continue to operate its own car parks.
Selling car park sites to private developers has the advantage that it produces a capital inflow which returns the capitalised value of future parking revenue streams to government in one lump sum.
The leasing and government owner-operator alternatives have the advantages that government retains more control over parking pricing in centres, can implement
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