Page 2807 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
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Funding for the flexible bus service will be extended for a further year. I would be very upset about the one-year extension, except that we did talk about this in estimates. The impression we were given of the reason for the one-year funding extension is that work is underway in terms of looking at potential improvements.
In particular, TCCS said that it was currently investigating a new booking system. You have to book the flexible bus service at least two days in advance, and your booking may be cancelled if someone else’s need is greater. Clearly, it does not have the capacity for the people who want to use it. I was very pleased that the government indicated that, while it had not funded it further into the future, the reason was that it intended to do bigger and better things in the future, and I look forward to that. Maybe, given the timing, we are looking at an election commitment. However it is delivered, I would like to see it.
I will not be nearly as positive about the next thing I want to talk about—roads. I do not think we should be spending tens of millions of dollars on road expansions or even on car park expansions. We all know that, from a climate change point of view, this is a backward step. From the point of view of mobility for about a third of people in Canberra who are not car drivers, this is probably also a backward step. Roads only temporarily make life easier for car drivers. They are like storage areas in your home: the more you have, the more you fill them up. Experts have a word for this, because it happens everywhere. We are not alone in this. They call it “induced demand”—build the road and, in many cases, people will use it. That is not the case everywhere, but generally it is so.
The problem with building things like that is that we are building a car-dominated future. The people who live in the outer suburbs of Canberra should be particularly unhappy about that, because it will entrench the fact that they have to spend an awful lot of money on transportation. The people who live in the inner suburbs with a higher population have a reasonable chance of getting some decent public transport. But if we spend more and more money on roads, it is the people in the outer areas who should be concerned that they are not getting a very good deal. They are becoming more and more vulnerable to petrol prices, although I agree that electric cars are moving in the direction of freeing people from being vulnerable to petrol prices.
Until we move to zero emission cars, roads entrench greenhouse gas emissions. They also entrench the idea of an awful lot of our city being filled with roads and road infrastructure, such as car parks. This is literally a waste of space. Importantly, we need to look at what else we could do with these funds, instead of building roads. If we want to use exactly the same contractors, so that we do not make life difficult in the short run, in transition we could spend this money on better cycleways, on better footpaths and on making exclusive bus lanes on our roads. The same skills would be used on these projects, but they would be contributing to a more sustainable future.
(Second speaking period taken.)
Going to active transport, the Greens are very pleased to see that there is funding for active travel improvements, in particular around schools. If we can get our young people walking or riding to school, it will set them up for good, for doing that in the
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