Page 811 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 18 March 2015
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to the airport or to other places. The traffic levels can therefore be quite high at times. This is exacerbated due to the area being adjacent to light industrial areas—both Queanbeyan and Beard—and thus a fair amount of that traffic is trucks.
This traffic can, of course, make the area unsafe for pedestrians, especially for children, in particular along Railway Street. This was an issue I pursued through TAMS when I was the relevant minister with responsibility for Roads ACT. Of course, this has now passed across to Minister Gentleman as the current minister for roads. He has outlined some of the key steps that TAMS will be taking, including the installation of a new set of traffic lights on the corner of Pialligo Avenue and Oaks Estate Road.
I certainly reject the characterisation put forward by Mr Doszpot that I have taken no interest in Oaks Estate. In that portfolio area I have sought to progress issues that were raised with me as matters of concern and that also were raised directly with TAMS.
Regarding the provision of an ACTION bus service to Oaks Estate, it is correct that there is no dedicated ACTION bus service to Oaks Estate. However, I would like to assure Mr Doszpot that this is not because the government and I have not considered whether we should be providing such a service. The government has considered it a number of times, most recently late last year.
These are things that have to be weighed up as we look at the whole network. Certainly, in the redesign of the network I have looked at these issues and looked at what we can do because I am mindful of the letters that I have written in the past which asked previous ministers whether something could be done.
There is a tricky balance here. The patronage numbers for Oaks Estate are extremely low. There were 84 passengers in February 2015. That is for the whole month. There were 28 passengers for the whole month of January 2015 and 68 passengers in December 2014. Also, six children have term passes, although whether they all go to the same area is not known. ACTION does have an agreement in place with the Qcity bus company for Qcity to provide the services for Oaks Estate. For members’ interest, I will provide the detail on these services.
Oaks Estate residents have access to a north-west Queanbeyan loop service which travels via Oaks Estate to Queanbeyan interchange for connecting buses to the territory. It is hourly during peak hours and then there is an on-demand service using the local link service. That is the one that you can ring up and book for an on-demand service to come out and collect you. That service can be booked in advance.
I will reflect on the text of the speech, but I understood that Mr Doszpot said there is no service that goes into Oaks Estate. There is, in fact, a stop in Hazel Street, Oaks Estate that is serviced by Qcity. I accept that it is not as frequent as people would probably care for, but I think, if I was correct in hearing Mr Doszpot’s words, that probably was a slight overstatement of the situation on the table.
Qcity has services every day that run into the ACT—to Civic via Kingston, Manuka, Barton, Russell and also services to Woden via Narrabundah and Canberra Hospital.
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