Page 3725 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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infrastructure spend, or necessary government investment, can have a double-barrelled impact beyond its obvious purpose and boost the local economy at the same time.
It is exactly the same with light rail. It is an important transport investment. With commuters from Gungahlin to the city to spend around two hours a day in their car by 2031, we need to act now and plan on how we will avoid problems like that in the long term. But Canberrans deserve more bang for their buck. Light rail is proven to stimulate investment, and people who never use buses will use light rail. Business and developers know this and they are attracted to the permanence of a light rail system. Once somebody buys a home or opens a business near a light rail stop, they know it is there to stay, and that makes the investment a more appealing proposition.
We can afford to build light rail. By entering into a PPP, business bears the up-front cost and most of the risk. We can spread the cost over a generation, which is the generation that will also experience the benefits of such infrastructure. We start paying when Canberrans are riding light rail along Northbourne Avenue. An expert, private consortium builds light rail and operates it, and the city pays it to run and maintain it. In terms of the annual cost, it will be a relatively small part of the ACT’s overall budget. So our necessary and affordable investment in light rail is about much more than transport.
Meanwhile, as the city debates the merits of capital metro, and the arguments for and against—and there has been a lot of that being agitated across the city—in order to have a fair debate in the community we need to also understand what those who oppose light rail would do. Would it be more roads, more sprawl, less urban densification, fewer jobs or less infrastructure for the city? That is the debate that needs to be had—not just a one-sided debate with the opposition opposing light rail but then not explaining how they would deal with the growth of the city, the need to densify the city and the need to build infrastructure like that along these major transport corridors.
Sure, they could build Monash drive to accommodate growth in traffic from Gungahlin to Civic and beyond. They could continue to allow the rat running that already occurs through inner north Canberra and Belconnen suburbs to get worse. Northbourne Avenue could be torn up with extra lanes put in for buses to travel down and the associated changes that would have to come with that could be made—that is, no turning left off Northbourne Avenue to allow the bus lanes to operate in the most efficient way they can. Or perhaps they could just leave Gungahlin residents and those who live along that corridor to sit in the congested traffic for up to two hours a day. Those are all possibilities and they deserve to be openly debated as well.
But at the moment there is no debate. There is a one-sided opposition to one project in terms of the overall transport plan for Canberra. It is easy to make politics out of it; I accept that. But the issue that the government is trying to deal with is how we prepare the city for the best opportunities for the future. How do we do that? Do we ignore the pressures that are coming from the transport point of view? Do we seek to just fiddle at the sides, maybe expand a few roads, change a few intersections and add a few more bus routes, or do we play a role in the development of Canberra as the nation’s
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