Canberra scores high for liveability, brought down by public transport

We’re also the largest users of cars, with 84 per cent of us driving to work each day, even though we have some of the shortest distances between homes and activity centres.

These findings are in RMIT University's Centre for Urban Research Creating Liveable Cities in Australia new report, which measures city policies against their implementation.

Although Canberra wasn’t measured in terms of local government policies, it was included in data relating to three main liveability factors - walkability, proximity to public transport and access to public open spaces.

One of the report’s authors, Jonathan Arundel from the RMIT Centre for Urban Research, said Canberra scored particularly highly in terms of residents’ ability to walk between home and activity centres.

“Walkability is essentially reflecting the fabric of the built environment, and the extent to which that encourages or promotes walking, and that falls within the broader context of liveability, with this idea of having things that you need for daily life,” he said.

“It’s also the way the actual street network is laid out, and Canberra scored quite highly for street connectivity. That reflects I think good design, which is what people tend to associate with Canberra as a planned city.”

Canberra’s outer suburbs were also surprisingly well-connected compared to other cities, which the report identified as another legacy of good early design and planning.

“Canberra's interesting because it doesn't have density that Sydney does, but it does have good walkability, and walkability is not as clustered in the inner city as it is in Melbourne or Sydney, it's more evenly distributed,” Mr Arundel said.

But Canberra scored badly when it came to access to public transport, with just 13 per cent of residents within 400 metres of public transport stops, and 12 per cent with access to frequent services.

“One of the things that is interesting with Canberra, and probably does reflect on how poorly it has scored here, is that our indicator that we use combines both access and frequency,” Mr Arundel said.

“One of the things that penalised Canberra more so than other cities is a lot of the services seem to be planned on a nominal 30-minute timetable. But at different parts of the day because of congestion, that stretches out so that instead of waiting 30 minutes, you actually have to wait 32 minutes between services. We unfortunately need to put a line in the sand, and have to say that that isn't a service every half hour...

That means that while some people can use public transport for some kinds of trips, it's not a substitute for the car in terms of being able to fulfil all the different kinds of trips that you need to take throughout the day.”

And while Canberra had the highest proportion of parkland and access to open public spaces of all the capital cities - we’re not the bush capital for nothing - the city’s low density could be seen as something of a downer.

“One thing Canberra didn't score as highly on is density - that's having enough density to actually create enough people living in an area that shops and services can be located locally. That's something that's really important to keep an eye on,” he said.

“It's a challenge, there's always a tension between these different dimensions. There won't be a one-size-fits-all approach. Some people will still want to live on a block with a house and a backyard, but I think what's important to achieve the density without eating into existing parkland and public open space is to encourage mixed-density developments.”

But he said the report showed that Canberra’s good design legacy still provided the right blueprint for an increasingly liveable city.

“The fabric of the city and the street network in Canberra is already a tick in Canberra's box in terms of establishing the foundations for walkability and for liveability,” he said.