Page 471 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 February 2013
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That said, I will be supporting Mr Barr’s amendment to this motion. I think that some of the points that Mr Doszpot seeks to make just do not really cut it in terms of what our expectations should be. In a growing city, it is not reasonable to expect to get to every single major event by just driving there and parking right outside the front door. It is not feasible to put 10½ thousand people, as there were, into Manuka Oval and have everyone able to just rock up and park as close as they like.
We need to generate a different expectation around some of these events. The recent open day at the arboretum is in perfect juxtaposition to the position that Mr Doszpot has taken in this motion. On that day ACTION buses moved somewhere between 10,000 and 11,000 people from sites around Canberra to the arboretum, because there is not parking capability at the arboretum. We want the arboretum as it exists to be a forest, not a series of car parks. Therefore there is limited scope for people to be able to drive there.
On days when there is a normal number of tourists, that is going to be fine, but with 10,000 to 15,000 people estimated for that day, people could not just drive there. I think it is going to be the same for Manuka Oval. At the moment, there are only three or four major events at Manuka Oval a year. We have got the three or four Giants games and the odd cricket match. I do not think that it is feasible to talk about building a multistorey car park, which I think is what Mr Doszpot suggested, for that number of occasions. We need to have an expectation that for those big events we will take a different approach.
ACTION was able to shift into and out of the arboretum around the same number of people that attended the cricket. Effectively, they shifted the entire crowd that attended the cricket into and out of the arboretum in one day. There were 87 recorded bus trips over the day, with peak access between 9 and 10 am and a peak in people leaving between 12 and 12.30—I guess they wanted to get home for lunch. We had popular pick-up stations at Bruce stadium, Woden interchange, the city interchange, the Treasury building and Stromlo forest. I have been told that ACTION buses advised that they were overwhelmed with the positive comments regarding the free shuttle bus: all the customers that they got feedback from were extremely satisfied. Similar comments were picked up in the customer surveys that TAMS undertook on the day.
Mr Coe: Is that the arboretum or is it Manuka?
MR RATTENBURY: I am talking about the arboretum. This is the experience we had at the arboretum. The observation I make is that it is possible that that is the sort of approach we need to try and generate for events such as the Giants matches and the major cricket games.
I accept Mr Doszpot’s point that not everybody will be able to take public transport to the cricket. Some people will need cars. He cited examples of people with disability and people arriving at different times. That is fine. But there is parking around Manuka. On your point about spots being filled by workers during the day, I think that for people coming later there is a turnover of those spots. It is not about saying that everybody has to go by bus, but we certainly need to generate an alternative approach.
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