Page 3745 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 23 October 2013
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improvement programs, we need to be able to establish priorities and direct available funds to address those locations that are most in need.
The key point—and I would ask Mrs Jones and her colleagues to consider this very carefully—is: how should we prioritise intersection upgrades and safety improvements across the territory? Should we commit our limited time and resources to the intersections that we have identified as being most worthy of upgrades because of safety and traffic issues? Alternatively, we could take the approach where we commit the government’s limited funds to projects that MLAs decide to raise in the Assembly, invariably in their own electorates, or on projects that the Chronicle may have decided to report on during that previous week.
I believe that would be an irresponsible approach to managing the issue. It is a reality for government that the budget is limited, that we cannot make every upgrade immediately, and it is a sensible approach to try to rank and prioritise road safety improvements.
As an example, while Mrs Jones notes that Hibberson and Hinder streets have experienced 66 crashes in the last seven years, over the same period there have been 241 reported crashes at the intersection of the Barton Highway and William Slim Drive—that is, the big roundabout at the entrance to Gungahlin from the south.
One issue I am not sure MLAs or the public are always fully aware of is the cost of traffic upgrades. They are actually—and it does distress me—surprisingly expensive. Look at the local area traffic management program, for example. I have had all sorts of people lobbying me to get on with various bits of that in recent times or in some cases not get on with it, as the case may be.
But an interesting example is that we are currently looking at four sites around Canberra, making what most people consider are minor improvements—installing measures such as speed humps, chicanes and some traffic circles. To progress those sites will literally cost millions of dollars. I think the estimated cost of all of them is approximately $4 million. And that is just for those four sites around Canberra. I get, I guarantee, a letter at least once a week asking me for some further traffic calming somewhere else in Canberra. This gives you a sense of the scale of requests and the scale of public perception around safety issues.
TAMS needs to try to manage and prioritise literally thousands of sites across Canberra within the budget that it has. So its prioritising of expenditure must be done very carefully and as professionally as possible on the best basis of evidence we have. And I have a responsibility to ensure that funds we do have available are spent as responsibly as possible.
It is for these reasons that the Territory and Municipal Services Directorate has developed a system for ranking crash locations. It is a system that has been in place for several years and it seeks to identify locations across the ACT most in need of attention.
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