Page 390 - Week 01 - Thursday, 16 February 2012
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MR CORBELL: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Let us refer to the AECOM report directly. At page 3 of the executive summary, under the preliminary evaluation for Barry Drive, it says:
In the AM peak hour there were a total 904 vehicles that would have been eligible to use a T2 Transit lane along Barry Drive. If all eligible vehicles had utilised the T2 facility, then the average travel speeds of buses may have reduced as the maximum number of vehicles to maintain LoS B is approximately 840—even though Austroads reports that for 80 km/h roads traffic can maintain 80 km/h at LoS C. Thus LoS would decrease to LoS C if all eligible vehicles used the T2 Lane.
There is a bit of engineering speak there. It goes on, and this is the important bit:
A T2 lane is therefore not considered appropriate. A T3 lane could be considered from traffic flow perspective however at Kingsley Street the kerbside lane will become a trap right turn lane for buses only. There is therefore little benefit in a T3 lane on Barry Drive.
But the really important thing is what comes next. What comes next is the need to think longer term about our transport choices—not think about short-term populism like Mr Coe. The report goes on:
As Gungahlin continues to grow it is expected that traffic on the GDE / Belconnen Way / Barry Drive route into the City will continue to increase thus the benefits of the bus lane are expected to continue to increase over time.
It is very clear that we can either take a short-term, populist view like Mr Coe, who likes to continue to insist that the car is king, when every city in the world is working to reduce the need for increased road capacity for private motor vehicles and encourage and provide real choices for people to not use their cars for all of their journeys. That is what every other city in the world is doing, but Mr Coe wants to say that the car is king and that we should just provide for cars and bugger everybody else. That is not the way to approach the public policy debate on the issue of transport in this city.
The fact is that when the bus comes on time, everybody wins. Drivers in their cars win because there is less congestion on their roads, and people in buses win because they have a reliable journey. This is a difficult task in Canberra; there is no doubt about it. The dispersed nature of the city, the challenge of providing frequent rapid services over long distances and the need for good connections into the suburbs are challenges for us as a government and as an Assembly. We are doing the policy work, but it will not be aided by simplistic, short-term, populist measures like those proposed by the opposition, particularly when those measures fly in the face of the engineering evidence.
MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (5.33): I will speak very briefly to the report. It is good that we have got this process where we have had this work done. This is something the Greens moved to include in the motion of the Assembly. It is about whether it is
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