The trade-off between how far people are willing to walk to a bus or tram stop - and how direct the journey - is a question not only for the new light rail line from Gungahlin, but for Canberra’s bus network, which is notoriously circuitous in its efforts to get to as many people as possible.
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On Wednesday the project director of Capital Metro, Emma Thomas, said a fast journey time was front and centre of planning for the rail line, which meant rethinking the traffic lights in the Northbourne corridor and not too many tram stops.
The question of how far people will walk for public transport also came up at the launch of the government’s new climate change strategy on Wednesday, where the director-general of the Environment and Sustainable Development directorate, Dorte Ekelund, said a walk of one or 1.5 kilometres to a bus stop was not a big deal for most of the population, although she acknowledged it was a different story for the elderly and others not as mobile.
Executive director of the Australian National University Climate Change Institute Professor Will Steffen told the same event that in European cities, such as Paris, Stockholm and London, with good public transport, people walked an average 10 times further than in car-dominated cities in Australia and the US. Western Europe also had less of a problem with obesity than Australia and the US.
He was answering a question about the lack of open space in Canberra’s newer suburbs restricting children’s ability to get outside, and pointed out that good public transport meant lower demand for private green space.In Stockholm, where housing density was high and there was little green space around homes, there was a great network of parks and waterways easily accessed by superb public transport, he said. Stockholm rated as one of the most liveable cities in the world.
The government will soon release its new bus network, "Network 14", which will see fewer stops and more direct routes. But ACTION says 95 per cent of households will be within 500 metres of a bus stop.
Tuggeranong resident and active community member Russ Morison said the city’s bus network had always aimed to pick up as many people as possible along the route, but it was time for planners to get their heads out of the 1970s and into the 21st century. He fears that when the light rail line is extended beyond the city into the other centres, the same mistakes could be make, and said the key to attracting the stream of workers out of cars and onto public transport was a fast travel time.
Mr Morison, who is chairman of the combined community councils transport working group said his personal view was that light rail should be built on the major arterial roads and fly over intersections where there are traffic lights. He proposes "gigantic park-and-rides", not in the town centres, but on the major routes into the city. For Tuggeranong, he envisages park and ride spaces in Kambah, Cotter Drive and Lanyon.
The government was insistent on "tweaking the edges" of the transport system, Mr Morison said, urging it to "get radical".
