Page 210 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2012
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Currently the bus lane on Barry Drive is just that—for buses only. Anyone who uses that route to travel into the city on any given morning will face the frustration of an empty lane unable to be used by the motorist and at best in peak times used only by a handful of buses—perhaps just once every seven or eight minutes. For the other seven or eight minutes, the bus lane is pretty much unused except for perhaps the odd taxi. The motion we have here today opens up Barry Drive just that little bit more for the residents of Belconnen that choose to travel into the city by car.
It opens up that road to the residents of Belconnen that are forced to travel in by car because they have got to do errands beforehand, because they have got to drop their kids off at school, because they have got to drop their kids off at childcare, because they have got to drop into the shops on their way to work. These are very real scenarios that Canberra families in my electorate of Ginninderra face on a daily basis.
When it comes down to it, ACTION buses are not suitable for everyone, but we would like to encourage people to car pool. With that, as I said earlier, it is an easier cultural shift than to get people onto public transport and it is a cheaper, if not free, cultural shift than the hugely expensive ACTION bus network which is in operation at the moment.
It is important to note that absolutely everybody who drives on Barry Drive at the moment would win as a result of turning the bus lane into a T2 lane because if there are fewer cars in the two main lanes, the two open lanes of traffic, because some of the cars that were in those lanes are now in the current bus lane, in the T2 lane as it would be if this motion was successful or if the Liberals are successful in October, it would mean that there would be fewer cars in the other two lanes. The bitumen which is currently reserved as a bus lane would be far better utilised than it currently is. That would be a better return for the taxpayers who constructed that road.
Regardless of the success of this motion, this is an initiative of the Canberra Liberals and we intend to carry it out. We saw in November last year that the Greens agreed that opening up the Adelaide Avenue bus lane was a good idea—that opening that up as a T2 lane was a good idea. Why? It was because it encourages people to car pool, it is a better utilisation of that infrastructure and it poses no serious concerns. The only concern it posed was to the stubbornness of the ACT Labor government.
I hope the Greens today are going to support this motion. It is a motion in favour of the motorists of Canberra who are forced to use their cars, not because they like going on joy-rides but because they need their car to go from A to B and quite often to C, to D and to E. A person who uses their car in Canberra is often doing multiple things before getting to their ultimate destination and for that reason, the ACTION bus network is not appropriate or convenient for them in many scenarios.
I look forward to the Chief Minister reporting to the Assembly tomorrow on the T2 lane on Adelaide Avenue. It will be interesting to see whether she puts any spin on it or she does acknowledge that that was the right policy. It was the right policy when they implemented the T2 lane a few years ago, yet suddenly it was not the right policy in November. It seems from some of the press releases that we saw put out by the
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