Page 2487 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 13 August 2014
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
MR CORBELL: Madam Assistant Speaker, I heard Mr Coe in silence, and he should do me the same courtesy. He should know that the road network improves in its overall efficiency and operation if there are fewer people using it. How do you get fewer people to use it? You improve public transport. I know this might be a statement of the bleeding obvious for most people, but it clearly is not for Mr Coe. So I reassert it again: the benefits of improving public transit by investing in light rail are not solely given to or taken up by the users of public transit; they are also taken up by the broader commuting public. Reducing congestion has a broader benefit than simply the advantage given to public transit users.
The second point to be made is that Mr Coe makes these silly comparisons about travel time in the current year, or even in 2020, when light rail is due to become operational. He asserts that buses at the moment deliver a service of around 25 or 26 minutes during the peak and that light rail will do it in only a minute or so less. Mr Coe misses the point. Congestion along this corridor will continue to grow. It is not about congestion and travel time at one point in time; it is about congestion and travel time comparisons in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years. Those are the comparisons we need to make when we make assessments about this project. Mr Coe dismally fails to even address that question.
We know from the analysis that the government has put forward that without intervention on Northbourne Avenue, travel time for the general commuting public by the year 2030 will be 57 minutes—57 minutes—in peak time for the 12-kilometre journey from Gungahlin to the city. That is the future that Mr Coe and the Liberals want to consign us to. Every single motorist coming out of Gungahlin and travelling down Flemington Road and the Federal and Barton highways, down Northbourne Avenue into the city, will take 57 minutes in the morning peak in 2030 if we do nothing.
How does Mr Coe think buses are going to perform in that scenario? At the moment, buses use general traffic lanes. Presumably Mr Coe thinks that continues to be an acceptable outcome. Of course, what that means is that buses will have a dismal performance time in those outyears due to that increase in congestion.
This is an abject failure on the part of the Liberal Party. This is an abject failure on the part of their so-called advocacy for credible alternatives. They fail to have regard to the significant increases in congestion and travel time that will accrue if there is no intervention to give public transport priority on Northbourne Avenue.
The third issue we hear about from the Liberal Party is the assertion that buses can deliver a more cost-efficient service. That assumes that buses are given priority. I will give the Liberals some credit and I will accept that their position is that buses should be given absolute priority to get up and down Northbourne Avenue and not mix with the general traffic. Let us assume that is the case, because that is presumably their position.
This means one of two things. It means that the left-hand lane northbound and the left-hand lane southbound become dedicated for buses only—buses only. That means
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video