Page 2258 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 5 June 2013
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drives investment certainty along the corridor. It encourages people to live on the corridor. More people living close to public transport is consistent with the government’s long-term transport strategy, and light rail is a key way of starting this to work on the corridor between Gungahlin and the city.
I have spoken about the investment it will drive along the corridor. We know the experience of other cities nationally and internationally where you see higher house prices and greater desirability for access to live close to the public transport corridor because of the reliability and the easy accessibility that it provides. It reduces the need for people to have to live with one or two cars in the garage. Instead, they can take some of their journey by walking or cycling if they are commuting into the city, if they are commuting further away, rather than having to join what is an increasingly congested area of our road network.
It is the issue of congestion as to why Northbourne Avenue has been chosen. Northbourne Avenue is at capacity—three lanes in each direction at capacity in peak hour. The problem that has to be resolved there, of course, is that one of those lanes in each direction is currently dominated by public transport use, buses, in conflict with private motor vehicles. There is no priority for public transport. You have, effectively, one lane of traffic which could be used by private motor vehicles being used by public transport. This is creating further congestion, particularly during peak times, when you consider the very large number of buses that travel north and south along the corridor every day.
So for all those reasons, this work needs to be done. It needs to be done in a way which is a long-term solution for the city, not a short-term one, not even a medium-term one. If we are going to be making the sort of investment we need to make on this corridor, let us make it a long-term investment for the future of our city. That is why capital metro has been chosen. I am very pleased that the government provides funding in this year’s budget to establish the capital metro agency. It provides for the engagement of a highly experienced project director and chair of the project board and the recruitment of the skilled workforce we will need to drive this project through to its construction commencement phase.
This is a big project for our city, and it is the right time for this project to be commencing. At the start of a potential downturn in our economy, which will be exacerbated if we see some of the drastic job cuts that colleagues of those opposite federally have been talking about, we must have large infrastructure projects coming through the pipeline ready to respond. This will be one of those projects—$12.3 million for the establishment of the capital metro agency and another $5 million for the preliminary design studies and a delivery strategy to progress the light rail transit corridor.
This will be an important body of work that gets this project well and truly underway. We will need to undertake further economic and financial analysis, including the identification of finance funding and procurement options and a range of further investigations, as well as the development of a property release strategy along the corridor.
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