23 March 2007

Heckler

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A little bit of reverse Canberra bashing in todays SMH.

Worth a quick read.

Warning: do not fall off chair!

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Bonfire dreams of long trains and tunnels.

Light rail to Gunghalin was costed at 200 million plus.

when a bus is full, you wait for another bus. No one puts ona another bus. Same with light rail. They tell you to wait for another one anyway.

You need around 6000 passengers per hour to make light rail good value for money. And you still need a bus feeder network doh!

Light rail for the Gold Coast area was estimated at $400 million. The fanactics poo pooed the figure. Now the authorities are say in wil cost $550 million.

Canberra fracks around with the bus system to save $4 million and makes a hash of it. Do you see this Government spend hundreds of millions on light rail?

what for Bonfire? From the NCA expo at Regatta Point today, the man in charge said Civic will be heavily apartmentfied and people can either walk or push a bike to work.

Hi Louise, the SMH correspondent is right, my commuter trip from the inner north to Manuka is 8-9 minutes at 7 in the morning and a maximum 15 minutes in the heaviest part of rush hour…and it’s true that no-one bothers to talk about mortgages here. But that could be partly because many of the affluent people in this city are keeping their counsel – they are allowed to continue to occupy guvvy houses – and their mortgages are on houses at the coast…

Indeed. I hope they keep hating Canberra

Fortunately Sydney is too full of wankers to take the article seriously. Otherwise we would be in deep shit – the last thing we want is for them to move down here en masse.

11 min walk to work.

No problems of the ‘inner west’. Can get to a beach quicker than those in western Sydney. Can go the snow on Friday to snowboard, go home, then off to the coast on Saturday to surf. Can drive from one side of town to the other without paying any toll. Don’t feel like a sardine in the middle of town…….need I go on.

I love to visit Sydney. To live there would be hell. If I lived and worked on the north side of the harbour, maybe, but Melbourne leaves it for dead in the big city stakes, and I’m and NRL/ARU kinda guy

sure tuggeranong to civic via woden would be an excellent and sane route.

also: jerrabombera to civic via kingston(using the exisiting railway and a slight extension, electrified and converted to lightrail) and perhaps russell.

if the political will could overcome parochialism and state/federal rivalries id also suggest yass/goulburn – murrambateman – hall – belco – civic.

upgrade the rail line and have bungendore – def hq – qbn – kingston – civic lightrail.

the advantage of lightrail over bus is that when the bus is full – you need another bus and another driver. when the lightrail vehicle is full you can hook another vehicle up.

same staffing – more people shifted.

as rails are in place – developers and industry can plan and build knowing there is a way there staff can get to work, and residents can travel without driving.

As opposed to tuggeranong to civic.

putting a bus stop in is not public transport infrastructure.

building a light rail into the newly developed suburbs would hav been better.

winnell actually proposed that before gungahlin started to be built.

it was again suggested by gungahlin residents who saw how congested barton highway became.

then the ‘sustainable transport plan’ and – more buses (well actually its turned out to be less services).

a lightrail running from gungahlin to civic would cost less than the gde has.

as the first link in a network it would be a good place to start.

more practical than time travelling belco to civic busways.

TroyWilliams3:08 pm 23 Mar 07

Johnboy raises an important issue. Let me rephrase:

15 minute drive, 25 minute ride or a 40+minute bus ride.

cycling to work across the lake (well, over the bridge across the lake!) is about 15mins or so. unless i choose to go the long way and get some exercise in the fresh canberra air along paths without cars…

what’s not to want? who’d live in congested unparkable air-polluted balmain? (unless you like coffee…)

if the gov of the day wants to release land to for housing but not provide public transport infrastructure, not my problem 🙂

Such a pity it’s ACT Government policy to reduce your car usage and cram you onto their crappy busses.

25-35min drive to city from a ‘rural residential’ in peak zone is almost impossible to beat – and a cruise from my once-upon-a-time 1hr drive back and forth every day 🙂

TroyWilliams12:08 pm 23 Mar 07

A 15 minute drive / 25 minute ride from the suburbs to work is hard to beat, and almost impossible in any other capital (city dwellers excepted) … one more thing that makes Canberra better.

I walk (yes, walk not drive) from home to work everyday, and it only takes me 15 minutes – I bet very, very few sydneyites can say that. Our childcare centre is only 20 minutes walk away, and there are about 5 parks for the kiddies to play at with a 20 minute walk radius of my home.

4 mins to work for Mrs Hasdrubahl

0 minutes to work for me most days, on the days I work at home, which is most.

4 mins to work for Mrs Hasdrubahl. Sydney sux, bigtime.

Daily grind for me involves leaving home in gunghalin at ~0620/0630 – 10 to 12 minute run into civic – park for free and walk to work.

Going home is just as good – dodge peak hour on both ends of the day.

Pretty cruisey.

Non_Sequitur10:22 am 23 Mar 07

It’s nice to see an upbeat story. We moved here 15 years ago and have experienced everything that has been listed in this story. I wonder if it will recieve any comments in the SMH?

Well I think it’s good to see someone can stop looking down there nose. I find most ppl who knock Canberra tend to be small-minded and wrapped up in their own self-importance…oops, forgot that’s how ppl used to act when I was in Syd.

neanderthalsis10:06 am 23 Mar 07

Well, the 15 minutes to work is about right for a good days run in. Although anyone who thinks Canberra has no traffic hasn’t done Canberra Ave at 8:30; admittedly it is nowhere near as bad a the Ipswich motorway in Bris, my once daily nightmare.

She was right about the looks you get when you tell people back in the QLD that you now live in Canberra. They automatically think you are either a Public Servant or a leper.

The writer probably moved to the “outer” sides of Canberra – where new daycare centres are opening all the time. Most likely the Gungahlin area.

I live 15 mins from where I work – traffic isn’t too bad to boot (compared to Sydney). Children’s daycare and school are close to home.

Louise, it’s really where you live and how close to work you are in Canberra that makes the difference.

Irrespective of the writer’s political persuasions, it’s nice to see someone NOT bagging out Canberra.

I think the person who wrote that is as confused as I am now having read that.

Where is this 80 cents/hour parking, where is the instant daycare, where is the 5 minute walk to soccer, and where on earth is the no traffic and 15 minutes to work?

It’s not the same Canberra i live in.

Though I would assume SMH would perform due diligence.

Note that the article is a reader submission. It could’ve been written by a Stanhope staffer.

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