Page 3429 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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people, people with a disability, people without cars. The costs are repaid in manifold ways to the community as a whole. Our approach is to dramatically improve these services to make them a priority. Other cities around the world have done this successfully, and we can too. The ACT community deserves a high quality public transport system—something other cities already have.
The Greens are interested in creating opportunities to reconfigure our transport patterns, such as giving developers more flexibility to reduce car parking provision, providing more and better public transport routes and using demand management techniques to tailor and improve the provision of car parking.
One of the interesting ways this is now being used in Los Angeles is with flexible parking prices. Special adjustable parking meters can change the price of parking spaces based on demand. This allows street pricing to be set for a target of their being one space always free on each block face. Flexible real-time parking price adjustments appear to be a very good tool, and I would ask the government to investigate this.
When we make these kinds of suggestions, others in the Assembly portray the Greens as hating cars—today we have been portrayed as hating families—or of wanting to eliminate every parking space, or some other invented exaggeration. But the truth is that we want a sensible, considered approach to issues like city planning and car parking management—one that takes into account the long-term picture and that will serve our community best now and in the future.
We all recognise cars will be a part of transport in the future. It is about providing people with alternatives and not just focusing on one mode of transport. I commend Ms Le Couteur’s amendment to the Assembly.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (5.52): The sort of rhetoric that we are hearing from the Greens worries me in that it does not acknowledge the very nature and the very essence of the city that is Canberra. I think at the heart of what Canberra is is that we are engaged and that we are involved in our community across so many different aspects that it is the envy of the country. We do have the highest participation in organised sport. We have the highest participation in volunteering. We have the highest participation in cultural and artistic events. Part of the reason that we do have that is because of the easy access and ease of movement around Canberra.
Part of that—probably in the main—is the ability to use our cars and to use them wisely. I think this sort of blanket “cars are evil” approach that we hear so often from the Greens decries the fact that in many ways the way Canberra was designed, particularly in the 1960s, was with the car in mind. It has a large number of rapid transport corridors that allow cars to move at their optimal speed and optimal efficiency with minimal pollution—although it could always be better. Much of what we have heard today decries the fact that Canberra is very special in that regard. I know that people that move here and visitors here are just amazed at how easy it is to get around.
We can either protect that or we can destroy that. It is not to say that we cannot do things better, and it is not to say that we cannot do things that reflect the technology,
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