Page 3025 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 15 September 2015
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I listened to Mr Coe’s remarks today, but I do not think the LVC is the only issue when it comes to getting more residential apartments in the city. My former colleague Caroline Le Couteur has canvassed the issue of parking spaces. I have had discussions with developers in this town who want to adaptively reuse a building, but the parking requirements and the fact that old buildings only have a certain number of parking spaces underneath limit their ability to use those buildings. We need to see this not as a silver bullet but be prepared to discuss the broader issues of what are the other factors in these discussions. If you are required to put in a certain number of parking spots but they are not currently available in the basement, that can restrain the ability to turn an existing commercial office building into a residential development, for example.
When it comes to the ongoing renewal of the city and our town centres, we need them to be connected by reliable, efficient and effective public transport. As such, a well-resourced and flexible bus system is part of the equation, and that is why we also support developing the fixed spine of light rail across our city—to provide that high quality, high frequency, uninterrupted connection that does not get caught in the traffic congestion that buses get caught in. Within my ministerial portfolio Territory and Municipal Services delivers services the Canberra community relies on every day. The recent budget provided funding that allows TAMS to improve these services as part of the ongoing maintenance and urban renewal of our city. The work we are doing on enhancing our transport systems and networks and integrating them is an example of that with improvements to the ACTION bus system as well as a greater focus on active travel so that we are providing a range of options for people to get around this city smoothly and effectively.
The Bunda Street shareway is an example of great urban renewal. It has created a shared space for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists, and it is designed to support special community events and commercial activity. As somebody who passes through this space on a regular basis, I am pleased we have already seen a number of new cafes open in that area. One of the food outlets that were on the front page of the paper complaining about the Bunda Street works has, in fact, nearly doubled its outdoor seating space since Bunda Street was completed. A couple of other places are being readied to open in Bunda Street, so we are starting to see what the experts told us about these kinds of shared spaces. They produce vibrancy, they produce spaces people want to linger in. We are seeing some manifestation of that taking place in Bunda Street, and there is more to come.
The master planning that has been undertaken for the town centres at Woden and Belconnen has real potential to assist in the urban renewal of those centres with improvements to active travel and consideration of the release of certain blocks of land for residential development. I agree with Mr Coe on that point—having more people living in our town centres is highly desirable. Those of us who have been in Canberra for awhile—I know most people in this place have—will remember areas like Civic and Woden going back 15 or 20 years. They are still pretty quiet, but if you go back further when they were just commercial zones, people used to make jokes about how barren they were on the weekend, and they were well-founded jokes.
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