The ACT Government wants to put an ACTION bus route within five minutes' walk of every home in Canberra as part of its draft Sustainable Transport for Canberra plan.
The ambitious ''coverage'' plan would be augmented with guaranteed limits on waiting times for connections at interchanges and more stations and priority lanes for the city's public bus fleet.
Minister for the Environment Simon Corbell launched the plan yesterday at Belconnen bus interchange, saying he wanted 30 per cent of Canberra journeys to work to be taken by sustainable transport, foot, bicycle or public transport, by 2026.
He said that a ''business as usual approach'' to Canberra's transport mix would result in a doubling of congestion on the city's roads by 2031 and pledged to continue to study the possibility of light rail on major road corridors.
But the ACT Greens are unimpressed with the plan, arguing that the Government has consistently failed to match its rhetoric on sustainable transport with action. Mr Corbell said the plan contained a number of initiatives, including the guaranteed waiting times and coverage targets.
''For the first time, we're setting out very clearly where the priorities are for service delivery in public transport through the rapid, frequent and coverage service maps and for the first time putting in place service guarantees,'' he said.
''There will be a frequency of 15 minutes or less on the rapid and frequent service corridors, new guarantees about how long people have to wait to interchange.''
The plan calls for ''coverage'' service that feeds into the ''frequent network'' and ensures every home would be within 500m of a service of at least 60-minute frequency, putting a regular bus route within a short walk of every home in Canberra.
The minister said the plan would call for ''significant'' spending on public transport to continue for at least 10 years, but he shrugged off criticism by his ACT Greens power-sharing partners that the new targets were not ambitious enough.
''We know that even a 5per cent reduction of cars on our roads means that the whole public transport system works a lot more efficiently,'' Mr Corbell said. ''I think the targets are appropriate, they are well researched and they are backed up by the evidence, something that the Greens simply don't have.''
Mr Corbell said he believed a target of 20 per cent of trips to work had been achieved by 2011 but it could not be confirmed until this year's Census data was available next year.
Greens Transport spokeswoman Amanda Bresnan said that her party was disappointed with the ''unambitious'' targets for shifting Canberrans out of their cars and on to buses.
''The modal shift target is going to be really key in what you are aiming to achieve and what sort of investment the Government is putting, and this plan is based on a business as usual target from 2004,'' she said.
''It's that issue of having the impetus and drive to achieve something instead of just having the rhetoric, and right now, we just have the impetus.''
Ms Bresnan said the transport targets were inconsistent with the Government's greenhouse gas reduction ambitions.
''We've got a 40per cent greenhouse gas reduction target and if we go by the target, the Government has set for modal shift, it would probably increase our emissions rather than reduce them,'' the Greens MLA said.
''There's no use having the highest emissions reduction target in the country if we have an unambitious modal shift target, possibly the lowest in the country.''
The closing date for public comments on the draft plan is Friday, November 11.
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