The Conservation Council of the ACT has called on Minister Steel to establish a standing Transport Consultative Forum along similar lines to the existing Environment and Planning Consultative Forum.
Why would the Conservation Council have an interest in transport? Council’s mission is to protect nature and create a safe climate in the ACT and region. With the transport sector creating ongoing pressure to utilise natural habitat as well as being the largest source of carbon emissions in the ACT, Council’s interest is both logical and important. Do we really need another consultative forum on top of all the consultative mechanisms built into projects and policies?
Yes. Sure – there are formal consultation phases built into all policies and projects and these are essential. But of themselves they’re not enough. Transport is a complex mix of infrastructure, private and public vehicles, policies and – in the case of public transport – routes and scheduling, that need to be nested in the communities they serve. The often competing priorities of the various participants need to be understood for optimal solutions to be implemented.
This means ongoing consultation outside the project cycle: before the outlines are set as well as during implementation.
Unfortunately, the problems encountered by the My Way ticketing system demonstrate why effective consultation is essential to avoiding problems. Public transport advocates explicitly warned of these problems. Nevertheless, the release went ahead, with the resulting failures and frustration discrediting the public transport system more broadly. This is a result that nobody wants.
Rolling out the next stages of the Light Rail, both stage 2A that is currently under construction as well as the planned 2B and onwards, will also involve thrashing out many details and finetuning outside around the project milestone points of public consultation.
Perhaps most importantly, this ongoing community involvement helps maintain the social licence needed to deliver often controversial changes.
But a transport policy forum is also crucial to more than just transport specific issues. Implementing other parts of the Government’s city agenda will depend on getting the transport right: whether it is housing, health care facilities, or shopping centre redevelopments, transport is a key enabler.
The newly released draft Missing Middle policy is a good example of these interdependences: higher density housing and reduced parking can increase housing availability but also make for lively, liveable neighbourhoods, but with the support of effective options for transport, they can become car congested, inconvenient and isolated.
Similarly, any new suburbs, such as those in Molonglo, Ginninderry, or on CSIRO land in Belconnen should be subject to detailed and ongoing consultation on the development of the right supporting transport infrastructure – and this means prioritising access to public transport, bike and other alternatives to car dependency with all the financial and environmental burdens that go with it.
We want Canberra to be a city built for people – and how we move about the city is a crucial part of this: if we get it right, we have a system that is fairer, cheaper, more efficient, less polluting and takes up less space. If we get it wrong, we will end up spending even more time stuck in traffic, more money on buying, running and parking our cars, and have more urban sprawl and pollution.
The ACT Government aims to make Canberra into a more compact, environmentally sustainable city with reduced car dependence and more riders and walkers – aims which the CCACT strong supports. These goals are being realised through many good initiatives, such as the introduction of electric buses, the extension of the Light Rail and the Garden City bike paths and others, which we want to succeed.
These projects all depend on integrating the different modes of transport successfully into the fabric of the city and this requires sustained and detailed engagement with the community. A Transport Consultative Forum would be a big step forwards in getting there.