Page 185 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 12 February 2020
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we want in the future. It should be clear from everything I have been saying, including this morning about parking, that we want people to have high-quality and highly competitive non-car options. We want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We want people to be able to walk and cycle for transport and for recreation and to benefit their mental and physical health. All these things point to investments in options other than parking, so I am very pleased that Mrs Kikkert has changed her original motion, which was purely about parking.
Second, in one of the southern parts of Lawson, the parking problem looks to me like it is possibly the students from the University of Canberra trying to avoid parking restrictions on campus. This comes back to our earlier discussion today about parking restrictions. This is the area at the southern end of Wanderlight Avenue, which is just across Ginninderra Drive from the uni. This is not the same transport issue as faced by the hundreds of residents in the middle of the suburb. I would hate to see the ACT government waste a large amount of money on this and, if this is the case, there are other solutions, such as what has been adopted in other parts of the ACT. I am someone who used to live in Garran and, probably about 30 years ago, I found outside my house was a sign saying, “No parking”. This was because my house was very close to Canberra Hospital and people were trying to do anything rather than park at Canberra Hospital. There was no suggestion that we should build more parking in Garran.
Finally, Mrs Kikkert’s original call (b) would have required changes to the territory’s parking and vehicular access code, and this would need a Territory Plan variation and would take years. The parking code is a particular bugbear of mine. I have been pushing for changes on that for a very long time, well over a decade, and there has been no progress on that so far. It is one of our real problems in terms of urban intensification that developments are forced to put in parking, even if they are in locations which are very close to good parking and transport infrastructure. In some instances, they are putting in parking which is really not going to be needed by the residents.
If we are going to have more cost-effective affordable housing one of the things that we have to do is let people say, “I actually am living 100 metres from a light rail station. I don’t need a second car. I possibly do not even need the first car.” That is an option which we do not let people have. From the look of the parking code, many of the drawings and diagrams are from the days when computer graphics were done on a mainframe. I am afraid I seriously doubt that the changes to the parking code could possibly be in place for the second stage of Lawson, much as I would like changes to the parking code.
As should be pretty obvious, from the Greens’ point of view, we need a holistic solution to the whole transport problem. Mrs Kikkert’s amendment to her motion has addressed one part of this bigger picture—walking and cycling paths—and I applaud that part of her amendment to her motion.
What is missing is the public transport, and that is what my amendment has. We need some alternative public transport running because right now the full-size buses cannot go through the middle of Lawson. We do not have to wait for Stockman Avenue to be
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