Page 1572 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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The importance of sustainable planning in the ACT.
MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (3.32): I am pleased to bring this matter of public importance to the Assembly today. Sustainable planning is an area of great interest to the Greens and an area to which we are very committed. Sustainable planning is an issue which many Canberrans care deeply about as they recognise that the way we plan our city now impacts not only on them but also on future residents of Canberra. Recently we have had discussions in this Assembly about Canberra’s planning history. I have made the point, as I have many times before, that Canberra is a city that could and should have an excellent sustainable transport system. We have some challenges to overcome—for example, the low use of public transport that we currently have—but there is certainly no reason that we cannot excel with public transport.
We have heard the claim that Walter Burley Griffin apparently designed Canberra for the car. The Canberra of today is actually a significant departure from Griffin’s design. The large arterial roads and spread-out nature of the city were mainly facilitated by NCDC activities during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. When Griffin designed Canberra, cars were a luxury for most people. His plan in fact allowed for a tramway to be built and a mainline railway terminating in north Canberra. He also designed a compact city where walking and public transport would feature. There are boulevards in the design, but this of course does not necessarily imply favouritism to cars. Boulevards can be developed in a way to have active street frontages and be pedestrian friendly.
The Walter Burley Griffin Society were kind enough to provide some commentary on this issue. They noted that the main thrust of Griffin’s urban plan was medium to high density residential, a rail line through the city and tramways. The society added that it was elementary that it was the NCDC and Lord Holford, who was a consultant advising the NCDC, who focused the design of Canberra on car usage. It has been policy since the 1960s when successive governments started this focus.
The Greens have raised questions around this continued approach. There are many examples we can use from Australia and overseas about how a city can change its planning patterns. A good example is Ottawa in Canada. This city achieves one of the best sustainable transport results of any North American city. For journeys to work, 68 per cent drive, 21 per cent take public transport and 10 per cent cycle or walk. It achieves this with the lowest urban density of any of Canada’s major cities, a density that is comparable to Canberra’s. It has a population of approximately one million people.
It has achieved this by turning around its transport patterns. Since the 1970s, Ottawa has turned around its transport system with some key transport policy changes. It made public transport the priority for all new infrastructure and made building major new roads secondary to this. It expanded high quality transit services into lower density suburbs. It used suburban buses to feed into faster buses which run on prioritised busways. It provided on-street priority for buses on trunk routes, allowing them to bypass congestion.
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