Page 3392 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 21 October 2014
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parliamentary agreement. It is a system that can really help people who do not want to own a car or who want to own fewer cars.
The plan also proposed the introduction of low speed environments around shopping centres and community centres. This was also progressed through the 2008 parliamentary agreement. Of course, now we have successful and popular 40-kilometre-an-hour zones in all of the major town centres. Through work in TAMS, and further through the response to the vulnerable road users inquiry, these slower speed zones will be expanded into group centres and potentially into residential areas.
The Greens’ active transport plan discussed the benefits of building cycling highways and separated Copenhagen-style cycling lanes. Through the parliamentary agreement, the government is investigating the first cycle highway for Canberra, from Molonglo to the city and parliamentary triangle.
We now have the first Copenhagen-style cycle lanes built in Canberra, at the Kingston foreshore and also around the new Civic cycling loop. Incidentally, that 2010 plan also called for the building of the Civic cycle loop and I have been very pleased to be able to launch the first three stages of that loop. As TAMS minister, I am now overseeing the design of Bunda Street into an innovative shared space, which is now under construction.
It is useful to revisit the Greens’ active transport plan from four years ago because it is a good indicator of how far we have actually progressed. The percentage of people walking and cycling continues to increase. In the ACT we have the highest cycling rate of any of the capital cities. But it is still less than three per cent, and there is no doubt that we have much more work to do to ensure that this really is a cycling-friendly city.
If we can make that progress, we will turn Canberra into an exemplar of active living and active travel. We need to do that if we are to meet the mode shift targets that the government has set in its transport for Canberra plan.
An issue that I have stressed before is that mode shifts towards active transport are likely to come from lower represented groups, such as less confident walkers and riders, women, or older people, rather than groups that are already well represented and generally well catered for, such as the more confident sport riders who are using the on-road bike lanes.
As an example, women are underrepresented as bike riders in the ACT. The ACT has the highest participation rate of adults aged 18 to 39, but there is a significant difference in the rate of cycling between men and women. More than half the men but only 13 per cent of the women aged 18 to 39 ride each week. Women say that traffic danger is one of the biggest barriers preventing them from riding. So providing physical separation between riders and traffic and slowing down motor vehicles are good ways to assist more of this group to ride and potentially to increase our mode share significantly.
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