Canberra Times: Time to imagine a city with better transport

Very little in this life comes for free. And the renewed debate about pay parking in the Parliamentary Triangle has also renewed arguments about just how this territory caters for its citizens. While many people quite fairly suggest that workers mostly federal public servants who have benefited from free parking should now pay like everybody else, it’s not that simple.
Not all workers in the mooted areas have nine-to-five shifts, and their place of work is not in particularly commercial hubs, so the issue of viable alternative public transport again rears its head.

Many of these workers, and, indeed, Canberrans generally, would happily forgo the drive to work if there were sufficient public options. Parking in the areas under question is already severely stretched. And as the city grows, this will only get worse do we keep building more parking facilities? The notion of avoiding the morning battle for a space and being more conscientious about our environment would appeal to many citizens drawn to Canberra in the first place because of its clean air and natural beauty.

Thus, we come back to one of the great development and environmental debates about Canberra and its future.

As a planned city, it is blessed with roads where traffic flows are comparatively smooth. Not for Canberra the incessant scenes of exhaust-fumed, bumper-to-bumper, snail’s-pace bottlenecks. Driving is convenient and tempting.

The parking debate must, then, be seen as an opportunity to revisit imaginative, attractive transport alternatives.

At the moment we have a highly-criticised bus system struggling to meet demand and we have a taxi service that, while somewhat more responsive given the new competition, is still turning its back on airport traffic and leaving our city with a reputation for failing to welcome visitors that would give London’s Heathrow a run for its money.

We also have our bicycle paths which provide both a social and pragmatic way to get about the territory. Their upkeep, their reliability and their safety are essential. In a town where the ACT Government has pledged to reduce our carbon footprint and promote a clean and green reputation, encouraging more bicycle use through better lighting and subsidies for cyclists, for example, would not go astray.

There are also wide strips of land between the carriageways of arterial roads which link each of our satellite town centres. This space begs for some form of light transport trams, a monorail, a light rail with park-and-ride facilities for the outlying suburbs. It’s not fanciful, and some mature consideration of just how we can transform this city is both timely and critical for both ACT and Commonwealth planners.