Page 5450 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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reduce traffic congestion
provide health benefits such as reduced road accidents
provide environmental benefits such as reduced air pollution
provide the community with more transport options, and
reduce the cost of building and maintaining transport infrastructure.
So how will removing the T2 lane address the objectives in this new plan? How, for example, Mr Corbell, will it reduce traffic congestion? How does it deliver more transport options? How will it reduce the cost of building and maintaining transport infrastructure? The lane is already built. Surely the more vehicles we can get to use it the more cost effective the road is.
Perhaps part of the strategy to encourage people to get out of cars is to make life even more difficult for those who do drive, because that surely can be the only outcome for pushing more cars on to the existing lanes.
We know the Greens have long had a policy of fewer or no cars in Canberra. But in today’s society that is not a practical ideal and in Canberra it simply does not and cannot work. We have come to expect thought bubble ideas from this government, so we can only assume that this one from Minister Corbell is another one. I think he has been taking lessons in ridiculous ideas from Minister Barr.
Minister Barr’s solution to traffic congestion some months ago was to stagger school starting times around Canberra. And how did he think that might work? How would a parent dropping his or her child at school before starting work manage that if a school were to start at 9.30 or 10 o’clock? Minister Barr said at the time that getting 60,000 kids to school at the same time as you are trying to get 200,000 workers to work in the one hour is a logistical issue. Yes, it is. The 60,000 kids he referred to belong to homes in which some of the 200,000 workers live, and they often take their children to and from school, so you would simply be moving the peak periods to different times.
On reflection, this is about as ridiculous as cancelling the T2 lane and, I suspect, as much prior thinking and critical analysis was done before the decision was made to cancel the T2 lane as was done on Mr Barr’s wonderful new direction before the decision was made.
The announcement earlier this month said that the T2 lane was no longer necessary because Gungahlin Drive was now able to take more traffic. It was suggested that allowing buses to have their own lane on Adelaide Avenue is an important way to help encourage people to take public transport. Is the government seriously suggesting that people are not catching the bus because they car pool and that if car pooling was made less attractive they would catch a bus? Is that the best logic and research that the government can use for this?
How little does the government understand Canberra families? We have to accept that Canberrans use their cars because they need to, not necessarily because they want to. Transport economists call it “trip chaining”. Trip chaining is an important and widely recognised feature of travel behaviour. A trip, say, from home to work will often be
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