19 April 2016

Mix it up: Why mixed-use developments are key to Canberra’s future

| Kim Fischer
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kippax map

The draft Kippax Town Centre master plan continues the ACT government’s work in modernising our group and town centres in line with contemporary planning principles.

Canberra’s period of highest growth and construction was during the 1960s, a time when town planning prized neatness and separation of use. By building highly segregated residential suburbs, commercial districts, and industrial zones, planners encouraged a high reliance on cars to access jobs and shops.

Aside from issues of sustainability and transport, the biggest problem with this old-fashioned planning approach is that commercial centres become dead zones after hours. This leads vandalism and crime, and areas being perceived as unsafe. Planners now recognise that mixing residential developments with commercial developments is an important “eyes on the street” solution. By creating public spaces where residents and shop patrons are potentially watching at any time, people feel safer and crime levels drop.

Mixed-use developments more closely mimic the natural way that human settlements evolve. They provide important benefits such as access to nearby work, greater housing diversity, a stronger neighbourhood character, and pedestrian/bicycle-friendly environments.

One great initiative from Canberra’s early days was the Y-plan. This embedded the concept of mixed-use at the district level, and ensured a range of employment locations outside of the CBD that have saved us from the worst of the commuter problems faced in cities like Melbourne.

Mixed-use is also key to most recent developments such as the proposed cross-border development in West Belconnen / Parkwood. Over the next 20-30 years, up to 11,000 dwellings will be constructed. Residents will be able to choose between different precincts and a range of building heights including an urban village (1 to 6 storeys), village edge (1 to 4 storeys), and garden suburbs (1-2 storeys). The higher density regions are designed from the ground up to integrate a variety of uses that will ensure greater vibrancy and a more consistent level of public activity.

Urban infill and densification in our town centres such as Manuka/Kingston and Belconnen has also relied upon mixed-use principles. A greater residential population has led to more cafes and restaurants operating outside of business hours, creating a feel of activity and life.

By comparison, group centres such as Kippax and Jamison haven’t evolved significantly and while they may be a hive of activity during the day, they feel quite lonely and exposed after hours.

The influential urban activist Jane Jacobs championed the benefits for “density in generating vitality and the economic and social importance of diversity”, but cautioned that planning needs “careful observation and analysis of the way urban places actually work, rather than focusing on their outward appearance”.

In Canberra, a key challenge is to improve the liveability of town and group centres while respecting that suburban areas with few local facilities like Spence and Flynn will rely upon car travel for the foreseeable future. Even here, mixed-use has big benefits. We are seeing more activity flowing back to local shops as our larger centres get busier, encouraging people in our suburbs to walk and take shorter trips.

We are all a product of our times. Some of these changes challenge how we think cities should work. As the planning and urban design firm David Lock Associates wrote: “It is essential that collective consent for the lifestyle and behavioural changes needed to ensure sustainable growth is attained. Collective consent creates a sense of ownership across a community. This requires open and transparent conversations, using a range of techniques and media, in developing a vision for the future.”

One conversation we need to have more is about the function of the Capital Metro tram as more than just a commuter solution. Tram routes are ideal for mixed-use redevelopment, transforming the places they pass into vibrant, local communities where people live, play and work. The social opportunities unlocked by the tram are substantial and it would be a shame if they were ignored because of short-sighted thinking from certain political groups.

Do you agree that mixed-use developments make Canberra more liveable and sustainable?

Kim Fischer is a regular RiotACT contributor who is set to become a Labor candidate for the seat of Ginninderra at the 2016 ACT election.

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Charlotte Harper said :

Hi rommeldog56, I’m going to forward the questions you’ve listed there to the appropriate sitting MLA, because they have the access and resources to answer them. I’ll publish their responses here when I receive them.

Re Kim, I can say with confidence that her suggestion to email her is not an attempt to hide public discussion. She’s answered the questions as best she can at this time and is taking the feedback on board.

We’re not going to publish any further comments that criticise her for not responding here. It’s time to move on, I reckon.

See post #120. No response from the ACT Labor/Greens Government to the questions/issues raised in this thread..

Whilst I acknowledge the “time to move on” position, a “no response” reinforces the non accountability and apparent arrogance of this ACT Greens/Labor Government, to voters.

Kim Fischer – or any sitting MLA : is there any response to the questions raised in post 118 please – and to the other unanswered questions in this thread such as 10, 11 & 12 ? Just saying to email u privately re questions as you said in post # 89 isnt a response at all. Rather, its just an attempt to hide public discussion from those who don’t have answers.

There are also many excellent points raised by poster KentFitch in this thread that – if the ACT Gov’t really is seeking to convert ACT voters/ratepayers to their tram plan, need to be addressed in a way that isn’t a simple pre-scripted slogan.

Charlotte Harper12:39 pm 21 Dec 15

Hi rommeldog56, I’m going to forward the questions you’ve listed there to the appropriate sitting MLA, because they have the access and resources to answer them. I’ll publish their responses here when I receive them.

Re Kim, I can say with confidence that her suggestion to email her is not an attempt to hide public discussion. She’s answered the questions as best she can at this time and is taking the feedback on board.

We’re not going to publish any further comments that criticise her for not responding here. It’s time to move on, I reckon.

JC said :

The report doesn’t say that. The report says with increased development along the tram route congestion will increase. The development is happening tram or no tram. What the same report does say with the tram the level of congestion will be less compared to no tram.

See post 118 – which is the way I read the EIS too.

JC said :

rommeldog56 said :

james_gibbo said :

It typically costs about $50,000 to provide infrastructure to a new lot. The land, given how much of it we have, is essentially free in a free market situation. So you’re looking at $50,000 for a third of an acre lot if the government doesn’t meddle in things.

Canberra should be moving towards a lower density, not densifying. In 1885 in Queensland they made it state law that the minimum lot size was 400 square meters. Now we have cars and far more efficient transport, we could make half an acre the minimum. How great it would it be for families to have a big backyard again for an affordable price? Cities like Houston show the way forward. The average price for a new 250 square metre new home in Houston is $200,000. This is because state law forbids restrictive zoning.

One of the major reasons building in the ACT is so expensive now is because of the ACT Govt’s policy of drip feeding land releases – not keeping up with demand :

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/moncrieff-housing-blocks-sold-in-three-minutes-20151207-glhzhp.html

One of the things that beggers belief to me is the ongoing push to densify even the outer suburbs – such as Moncrieff. If the Tram – which is supposed to solve the Gunners poor transport planning issues – only goes from Gunners CBD to Civic, there will be more congestion created between outlying suburbs (such as Moncrieff) and where the tram runs. And if the tram wont take u where u want to go – u will have to drive – again increasing congestion. But then again, the Govt’s own Environmental Impact Statement on the tram forewarns of that increase in congestion caused by the tram, so people buying in these Gunners suburbs must know what they are in for.

The report doesn’t say that. The report says with increased development along the tram route congestion will increase. The development is happening tram or no tram. What the same report does say with the tram the level of congestion will be less compared to no tram.

JC, the bizarre thing is that the EIS actually does say congestion in 2021 with the tram is worse than 2021 without the tram, with population increases happening in both cases (but accelerated with the tram). This had me flummoxed, but the reason is revealed by the intersection delay times for these respective cases in the tables in Volume 3, Part 5, Appendix B, labelled “project 2021” and “base 2021” respectively. These tables contain “errors” favouring the tram case as TAMS and EPD notes in their response to the EIS as described here: http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/faq.html#eisapend but that’s another story – without the benefit of these “errors”, the increased congestion resulting from the tram project is flabbergasting).

Even not including the effect of these errors, a commute car journey roundtrip, Gung-Civic-Gung is modelled by Capital Metro as taking over 3 minutes longer if the tram is built (even when extra road lane duplication is performed if the tram is built, but not performed otherwise).

Average combined AM and PM peak period vehicle speed over the road network around the proposed route (not just traffic on the direct route) decreases from 27.8 km/hr without light-rail to 23.1 km/hr with light-rail (EIS Volume 3, Part 5, Table 4.2, page 38).

I agree this is remarkable, but I guess when you add 10 new sets of lights and bugger the signal phasing by giving priority to the tram, this is what happens.

wildturkeycanoe5:54 am 18 Dec 15

KentFitch said :

dungfungus said :

Charlotte Harper said :

Here’s part of the Government’s press release response to that story/photograph:

The Canberra Liberals have again misled Canberrans on the facts of light rail and its impact on Northbourne Avenue, Minister for Capital Metro Simon Corbell said today.


.

And ACT Labor’s artists impressions of wireless trams travelling at supersonic speed up Northbourne Avenue are not misleading?
Give me a break!

In search of the hipster hangouts alluded to in the ABC “Fasttrack” news special, and some “before and after” shots of the Gold Coast tram route, and some also “packet -v- product” comparisons, which make you wonder about the brief given to the artists:

http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/GCLR.html

I think these before and after pics need to be put up on billboards all over Canberra, so residents can see what the outcome will actually look like when Cantram is up and running. Not that it’ll make an iota of difference, Govco is hell bent on doing it even if all of CBR is opposed, because we “need” it to “grow up”.

wildturkeycanoe6:41 am 17 Dec 15

rubaiyat said :

Some of Australia’s worst salination and erosion is happening around the ACT.

All the more sand for some people to stick their heads in.

I believe the production of rice and other crops in areas such as Leeton and Griffith, where there is little available water, has a big impact on erosion in some places but not the A.C.T. They rely on water flows from the Murrumbidgee River, which originates as we know from around these parts. Googong Dam and the Cotter no doubt play a role in supplying some of this water, but most comes from Blowering Dam near Tumut and look what that irrigation has done for erosion in the Tumut River.
Why do we insist on planting crops usually grown in flooded fields, but here in an arid, dry area without any reliable water source nearby? Of course erosion through the channeling of water through existing water courses will damage the environment and flooding the open plains with it all raises salinity levels to almost unsustainable levels. But not in Canberra, this is happening out west. I couldn’t find any issues with Canberra’s saltiness [except for in the people].
What has this to do with densification of the A.C.T though?

rommeldog56 said :

james_gibbo said :

It typically costs about $50,000 to provide infrastructure to a new lot. The land, given how much of it we have, is essentially free in a free market situation. So you’re looking at $50,000 for a third of an acre lot if the government doesn’t meddle in things.

Canberra should be moving towards a lower density, not densifying. In 1885 in Queensland they made it state law that the minimum lot size was 400 square meters. Now we have cars and far more efficient transport, we could make half an acre the minimum. How great it would it be for families to have a big backyard again for an affordable price? Cities like Houston show the way forward. The average price for a new 250 square metre new home in Houston is $200,000. This is because state law forbids restrictive zoning.

One of the major reasons building in the ACT is so expensive now is because of the ACT Govt’s policy of drip feeding land releases – not keeping up with demand :

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/moncrieff-housing-blocks-sold-in-three-minutes-20151207-glhzhp.html

One of the things that beggers belief to me is the ongoing push to densify even the outer suburbs – such as Moncrieff. If the Tram – which is supposed to solve the Gunners poor transport planning issues – only goes from Gunners CBD to Civic, there will be more congestion created between outlying suburbs (such as Moncrieff) and where the tram runs. And if the tram wont take u where u want to go – u will have to drive – again increasing congestion. But then again, the Govt’s own Environmental Impact Statement on the tram forewarns of that increase in congestion caused by the tram, so people buying in these Gunners suburbs must know what they are in for.

The report doesn’t say that. The report says with increased development along the tram route congestion will increase. The development is happening tram or no tram. What the same report does say with the tram the level of congestion will be less compared to no tram.

rubaiyat said :

Some reading matter for those who read:

http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/

http://www.aginnovators.org.au/initiatives/sustainability/information-papers/soil-conservation

http://www.grahamandrews.com/soils_and_dust.html

Some of Australia’s worst salination and erosion is happening around the ACT.

All the more sand for some people to stick their heads in.

I read. And I think. From your: http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/

“A rough calculation of current rates of soil degradation suggests we have about 60 years of topsoil left.”
“degraded soil will mean that we will produce 30% less food over the next 20-50 years…against a background of projected demand requiring us to grow 50% more food.”
“This issue is already causing conflicts in India, China, Pakistan and the Middle East and before climate change and food security really hit, the next wars are likely to be fought over unsustainable irrigation.”
“a staggering paper was published recently indicating that nearly half of the sea level rise since 1960 is due to irrigation water flowing straight past the crops and washing out to sea.”
“Obesity in the US cost 150 billion dollars – 20% of the health budget – in 2008, the latest figures available, and this huge cost will rise as the broken food system takes its toll.”

Conclusions:
1. Soil scientists, jealous of all the attention climate scientists are getting, want a bit of the international conference/grant action by making their own neo-Malthusian claims.
2. Soil erosion is a higher priority than climate change because the impact is more immediate, more certain and more dire.
3. So we can stop worrying about climate change because before that happens we’ll run out of food, or be nuked, or drown from rising sea levels, or be too fat to care.

But I think I’ve read it all before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_1975!_America%27s_Decision:_Who_Will_Survive%3F

james_gibbo said :

It typically costs about $50,000 to provide infrastructure to a new lot. The land, given how much of it we have, is essentially free in a free market situation. So you’re looking at $50,000 for a third of an acre lot if the government doesn’t meddle in things.

Canberra should be moving towards a lower density, not densifying. In 1885 in Queensland they made it state law that the minimum lot size was 400 square meters. Now we have cars and far more efficient transport, we could make half an acre the minimum. How great it would it be for families to have a big backyard again for an affordable price? Cities like Houston show the way forward. The average price for a new 250 square metre new home in Houston is $200,000. This is because state law forbids restrictive zoning.

One of the major reasons building in the ACT is so expensive now is because of the ACT Govt’s policy of drip feeding land releases – not keeping up with demand :

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/moncrieff-housing-blocks-sold-in-three-minutes-20151207-glhzhp.html

One of the things that beggers belief to me is the ongoing push to densify even the outer suburbs – such as Moncrieff. If the Tram – which is supposed to solve the Gunners poor transport planning issues – only goes from Gunners CBD to Civic, there will be more congestion created between outlying suburbs (such as Moncrieff) and where the tram runs. And if the tram wont take u where u want to go – u will have to drive – again increasing congestion. But then again, the Govt’s own Environmental Impact Statement on the tram forewarns of that increase in congestion caused by the tram, so people buying in these Gunners suburbs must know what they are in for.

KentFitch said :

dungfungus said :

Charlotte Harper said :

Here’s part of the Government’s press release response to that story/photograph:

The Canberra Liberals have again misled Canberrans on the facts of light rail and its impact on Northbourne Avenue, Minister for Capital Metro Simon Corbell said today.


.

And ACT Labor’s artists impressions of wireless trams travelling at supersonic speed up Northbourne Avenue are not misleading?
Give me a break!

In search of the hipster hangouts alluded to in the ABC “Fasttrack” news special, and some “before and after” shots of the Gold Coast tram route, and some also “packet -v- product” comparisons, which make you wonder about the brief given to the artists:

http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/GCLR.html

What a great post and very revealing before and after pics via the link.
I think Verdelle Smith can summarize what is about to happen (she isn’t a transit hipster. by the way):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RljEFI0up9U

dungfungus said :

Charlotte Harper said :

Here’s part of the Government’s press release response to that story/photograph:

The Canberra Liberals have again misled Canberrans on the facts of light rail and its impact on Northbourne Avenue, Minister for Capital Metro Simon Corbell said today.


.

And ACT Labor’s artists impressions of wireless trams travelling at supersonic speed up Northbourne Avenue are not misleading?
Give me a break!

In search of the hipster hangouts alluded to in the ABC “Fasttrack” news special, and some “before and after” shots of the Gold Coast tram route, and some also “packet -v- product” comparisons, which make you wonder about the brief given to the artists:

http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/GCLR.html

Charlotte Harper said :

Here’s part of the Government’s press release response to that story/photograph:

The Canberra Liberals have again misled Canberrans on the facts of light rail and its impact on Northbourne Avenue, Minister for Capital Metro Simon Corbell said today.

“The Canberra Liberals are misleading Canberrans with this cynical attempt to imply that Northbourne Avenue will look like a highway, which just simply isn’t the case,” Mr Corbell said.

The Capital Metro reference design indicates that light rail tracks will occupy about 7 metres of Northbourne Avenue’s total 27 metre width, leaving 10 metres on either side for landscaping and trees.

The government expects that the semi-mature Eucalyptus Mannifera will be approximately 4-5 metres high when first planted during the construction phase of Capital Metro.

“The Canberra Liberals’ ill-informed artists’ impression of light rail on Northbourne is misleading and does not represent what Northbourne Avenue will look like once light rail is built,” Mr Corbell said.

“The fact is there will be 4-5 metre high semi-mature Eucalyptus Mannifera with the light rail tracks taking up less than one third of the total width of the median.”

The ACT Government has announced that it will replace aging trees along Northbourne Avenue with 1000 additional trees during the construction phase of Capital Metro stage one.

“The ACT Government has always been clear that Northbourne Avenue will retain its boulevard character, with 1000 more trees once light rail has been built than there is today,” Mr Corbell said.

Between 2010 and 2014 the number of trees on the Northbourne Avenue and Federal Highway median of the light rail corridor fell from 802 to just 484 through failing health, storm damage and removal of dead and dangerous trees. A 2014 assessment of the trees in the corridor found only 59% of the remaining trees were healthy.

And ACT Labor’s artists impressions of wireless trams travelling at supersonic speed up Northbourne Avenue are not misleading?
Give me a break!

rommeldog56 said :

The ACT Liberals view of what Northborne Ave will look like post the tram :

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/what-would-northbourne-avenue-look-like-without-trees-20151210-gll2id.html

Given it’s from the ACT Liberals and so presumably likely to be a worst case scenario (?), still not that attractive I would think.

I understand that Corbell or Barr have criticised the artists impression.

Enjoy !

Whatever is put down the median strip on Northbourne (tram,bus or monorail) will require excavation and relocation of the underground services which are still unknown at this stage.
This alone will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and cause unimaginable chaos, so neither modes are viable.
Canberra’s leaders want us to have that “big Euro-city vibe” and road traffic congestion, albeit for a couple of hours a day only, is part and parcel of that.

The ACT Liberals view of what Northborne Ave will look like post the tram :

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/what-would-northbourne-avenue-look-like-without-trees-20151210-gll2id.html

Given it’s from the ACT Liberals and so presumably likely to be a worst case scenario (?), still not that attractive I would think. I understand that Corbell or Barr have criticised the artists impression.

Enjoy !

Charlotte Harper10:48 am 15 Dec 15

Here’s part of the Government’s press release response to that story/photograph:

The Canberra Liberals have again misled Canberrans on the facts of light rail and its impact on Northbourne Avenue, Minister for Capital Metro Simon Corbell said today.

“The Canberra Liberals are misleading Canberrans with this cynical attempt to imply that Northbourne Avenue will look like a highway, which just simply isn’t the case,” Mr Corbell said.

The Capital Metro reference design indicates that light rail tracks will occupy about 7 metres of Northbourne Avenue’s total 27 metre width, leaving 10 metres on either side for landscaping and trees.

The government expects that the semi-mature Eucalyptus Mannifera will be approximately 4-5 metres high when first planted during the construction phase of Capital Metro.

“The Canberra Liberals’ ill-informed artists’ impression of light rail on Northbourne is misleading and does not represent what Northbourne Avenue will look like once light rail is built,” Mr Corbell said.

“The fact is there will be 4-5 metre high semi-mature Eucalyptus Mannifera with the light rail tracks taking up less than one third of the total width of the median.”

The ACT Government has announced that it will replace aging trees along Northbourne Avenue with 1000 additional trees during the construction phase of Capital Metro stage one.

“The ACT Government has always been clear that Northbourne Avenue will retain its boulevard character, with 1000 more trees once light rail has been built than there is today,” Mr Corbell said.

Between 2010 and 2014 the number of trees on the Northbourne Avenue and Federal Highway median of the light rail corridor fell from 802 to just 484 through failing health, storm damage and removal of dead and dangerous trees. A 2014 assessment of the trees in the corridor found only 59% of the remaining trees were healthy.

miz said :

It is unbelievable that so much arable land in Australia IS actually being built on or permanently damaged through a lack of control over corporate interests (mostly foreign, i.e. not in the national interest who seem to be able to frack and mine with impunity). It is not unrelated to be concerned about restricting block sizes, which basically prevents people from growing their own, having chooks etc. You need access to water to grow good food and the size of the continent is irrelevant as most of it is not arable or is marginal (i.e. needing large subsidies). In other words, there is a burgeoning class issue at an elemental level re access to and control over fresh food.

Indeed. We have governments of both persuasions quite insistent on cramming low and medium income earners into Soviet-style apartment housing, despite the fact they could easily live in detached homes on big blocks if not for planning regulations driving up the cost of them.

Some reading matter for those who read:

http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/

http://www.aginnovators.org.au/initiatives/sustainability/information-papers/soil-conservation

http://www.grahamandrews.com/soils_and_dust.html

Some of Australia’s worst salination and erosion is happening around the ACT.

All the more sand for some people to stick their heads in.

It is unbelievable that so much arable land in Australia IS actually being built on or permanently damaged through a lack of control over corporate interests (mostly foreign, i.e. not in the national interest who seem to be able to frack and mine with impunity). It is not unrelated to be concerned about restricting block sizes, which basically prevents people from growing their own, having chooks etc. You need access to water to grow good food and the size of the continent is irrelevant as most of it is not arable or is marginal (i.e. needing large subsidies). In other words, there is a burgeoning class issue at an elemental level re access to and control over fresh food.

Hosinator said :

Because eating isn’t important.

Continuously building houses on the fringes just leads to increased congestion and no, building more roads does not ease it, there are plenty of studies proving this.

More suburbs also means more taxes. Building and maintaining expanding suburbs is expensive. Roads, water, sewers, electricity, schools, fire services, ambulance services, police, ongoing landscaping services and the list goes on and on. These services are not cheap and a few households paying rates don’t cover the costs.

So bite the bullet and accept densification of Canberra.

Australia produces enough food for 60 million people without intensive farming techniques, and could produce enough for 200 million with intensive techniques.

It typically costs about $50,000 to provide infrastructure to a new lot. The land, given how much of it we have, is essentially free in a free market situation. So you’re looking at $50,000 for a third of an acre lot if the government doesn’t meddle in things.

Canberra should be moving towards a lower density, not densifying. In 1885 in Queensland they made it state law that the minimum lot size was 400 square meters. Now we have cars and far more efficient transport, we could make half an acre the minimum. How great it would it be for families to have a big backyard again for an affordable price? Cities like Houston show the way forward. The average price for a new 250 square metre new home in Houston is $200,000. This is because state law forbids restrictive zoning.

rubaiyat said :

james_gibbo said :

rubaiyat said :

Interesting what “we know”!

The whole Molonglo Valley down stream of Scrivener Dam is being buried under Macmansions, bitumen and concrete.

The remaining areas of Gungahlin are being built up and West Belconnen is under way.
/quote]

Your dreams of the final elimination of all green space is well under way in the massive Real Estate speculation that is the A.C.T. You do realise that is is finite, and eventually (too late of course, as usual) we will have to think about urban infill.

Final elimination of all green space? Do you know how big Australia is? Do you know that urban settlement comprises less than 0.2% of all land in Australia? Do you realise there is literally hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of marginal land used for nothing better than grazing right now, right outside Canberra?

Do you realise how much arable land there is in Australia, the driest and least fertile continent on the planet outside of Antartica, and how much of that is now under all the bitumen, concrete and Macmansions?

Oddly enough I bet you like your steak, but we all know that springs magically out of the refrigerator section of your supermarket.

You mean, that…food doesn’t grow in the refrigerator! I’m aghast!
Shows how removed from reality some parts of the population are. Milk comes from a tap too, in case you didn’t know. No cows involved, so no farm land needed.

+1.

Rotten_berry11:56 pm 08 Dec 15

Hosinator said :

Continuously building houses on the fringes just leads to increased congestion and no, building more roads does not ease it, there are plenty of studies proving this.

More suburbs also means more taxes. Building and maintaining expanding suburbs is expensive. Roads, water, sewers, electricity, schools, fire services, ambulance services, police, ongoing landscaping services and the list goes on and on. These services are not cheap and a few households paying rates don’t cover the costs.

So bite the bullet and accept densification of Canberra.

If all that stuff is too expensive how did we manage to afford it in past, when the blocks were all 800 sqm and the growth rate (as percentage of existing population) was much higher? Food for thought.

I’m ok with densification, but if are going to have population growth (with birth rates at or below replacement it’s a choice at the federal level) then we are going to have to build new houses too. The same people who want to ban outward growth turn around and complain if apartments or even townhouses are proposed in their leafy back yards. Much of the anti-sprawl campaigning to me smells a little too much like a socially acceptable way to dress up good old fashioned financial self interest. It’s not like we’re paving over prime agricultural land…

wildturkeycanoe11:08 pm 08 Dec 15

Hosinator said :

So bite the bullet and accept densification of Canberra.

It is possible to live without the need for most of these services run to your front door, but government doesn’t want that either because they can’t charge you rates for nothing.

Final elimination of all green space? Do you know how big Australia is? Do you know that urban settlement comprises less than 0.2% of all land in Australia? Do you realise there is literally hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of marginal land used for nothing better than grazing right now, right outside Canberra?

Because eating isn’t important.

Continuously building houses on the fringes just leads to increased congestion and no, building more roads does not ease it, there are plenty of studies proving this.

More suburbs also means more taxes. Building and maintaining expanding suburbs is expensive. Roads, water, sewers, electricity, schools, fire services, ambulance services, police, ongoing landscaping services and the list goes on and on. These services are not cheap and a few households paying rates don’t cover the costs.

So bite the bullet and accept densification of Canberra.

james_gibbo said :

rubaiyat said :

Interesting what “we know”!

The whole Molonglo Valley down stream of Scrivener Dam is being buried under Macmansions, bitumen and concrete.

The remaining areas of Gungahlin are being built up and West Belconnen is under way.
/quote]

Your dreams of the final elimination of all green space is well under way in the massive Real Estate speculation that is the A.C.T. You do realise that is is finite, and eventually (too late of course, as usual) we will have to think about urban infill.

Final elimination of all green space? Do you know how big Australia is? Do you know that urban settlement comprises less than 0.2% of all land in Australia? Do you realise there is literally hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of marginal land used for nothing better than grazing right now, right outside Canberra?

Do you realise how much arable land there is in Australia, the driest and least fertile continent on the planet outside of Antartica, and how much of that is now under all the bitumen, concrete and Macmansions?

Oddly enough I bet you like your steak, but we all know that springs magically out of the refrigerator section of your supermarket.

rubaiyat said :

The whole Molonglo Valley down stream of Scrivener Dam is being buried under Macmansions, bitumen and concrete.

The remaining areas of Gungahlin are being built up and West Belconnen is under way.

Your dreams of the final elimination of all green space is well under way in the massive Real Estate speculation that is the A.C.T. You do realise that is is finite, and eventually (too late of course, as usual) we will have to think about urban infill.

Right on rubaiyat. This government has NEVER delivered any good new development.

Instead of respecting Canberra’s history when developing exburbs, they just produce rubbish and claim it’s ‘what is happening everywhere’. They ignore that they could allow the inner suburbs to go high density.

Why are the inner suburbs full of big blocks, but the exburbs are all <400m2?

rubaiyat said :

Interesting what “we know”!

The whole Molonglo Valley down stream of Scrivener Dam is being buried under Macmansions, bitumen and concrete.

The remaining areas of Gungahlin are being built up and West Belconnen is under way.
/quote]

Your dreams of the final elimination of all green space is well under way in the massive Real Estate speculation that is the A.C.T. You do realise that is is finite, and eventually (too late of course, as usual) we will have to think about urban infill.

Final elimination of all green space? Do you know how big Australia is? Do you know that urban settlement comprises less than 0.2% of all land in Australia? Do you realise there is literally hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of marginal land used for nothing better than grazing right now, right outside Canberra?

james_gibbo said :

We know that the ACT government has driven up the price of housing in Canberra to record levels by failing to release any land.

Interesting what “we know”!

The whole Molonglo Valley down stream of Scrivener Dam is being buried under Macmansions, bitumen and concrete.

The remaining areas of Gungahlin are being built up and West Belconnen is under way.

Your dreams of the final elimination of all green space is well under way in the massive Real Estate speculation that is the A.C.T. You do realise that is is finite, and eventually (too late of course, as usual) we will have to think about urban infill.

A fairy tale story here about LRT in Arizona.
It could have been from the Capital Metro handbook because all the same scenarios and words (sustainable, vibrant etc.) are used.

There is a sobering last sentence as the source of the article is revealed thus ending the dream.
http://mesaindependent.com/news/the-growth-of-downtown-mesa-where-the-track-is-leading/

james_gibbo said :

It is interesting that politicians seem incredibly intent on forcing us into Soviet-style apartment blocks. Apparently it’s “sustainable”.

It’s also very interesting to see established home owners push for this. Socialism for thee, not for me?

We know that the ACT government has driven up the price of housing in Canberra to record levels by failing to release any land. We know that the price per square meter of a new lot in Canberra is about ten times what it should be.

I think we should probably let people decide how they want to live, instead if decreeing that the only “good” way to live is in a small dog box, going to trendy cafes, having no children and voting for more socialism. We should PERMANENTLY abolish zoning on the urban fringe, like Houston, and the price of a free standing home would crash to a more moderate $200,000.

“Man is the greatest value in the state run by the people.
If there are people, there are problems.
No people, no problems”.
(Stalin)

It is interesting that politicians seem incredibly intent on forcing us into Soviet-style apartment blocks. Apparently it’s “sustainable”.

It’s also very interesting to see established home owners push for this. Socialism for thee, not for me?

We know that the ACT government has driven up the price of housing in Canberra to record levels by failing to release any land. We know that the price per square meter of a new lot in Canberra is about ten times what it should be.

I think we should probably let people decide how they want to live, instead if decreeing that the only “good” way to live is in a small dog box, going to trendy cafes, having no children and voting for more socialism. We should PERMANENTLY abolish zoning on the urban fringe, like Houston, and the price of a free standing home would crash to a more moderate $200,000.

rommeldog56 said :

Kim Fischer said :

Thanks to everyone for their comments.

It is important to have a debate and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I feel the economic and social arguments for and against have been thoroughly covered by others in the comments.

However anyone who would like to have further discussions is very welcome to email me on kim@kimfischer.com.au.

Yes – debate and gathering opinion is good – making decision without that is not good.

Little was know about the detail of the tram at the 2012 election – much, much more detail has come to light since then. The signing of contracts before the 2016 ACT LA election was apparently not even mentioned in the ACT Labor policy – as evidenced on RiotAct previously.

On Mark Partons radio show on 1206 late last week, Chief Minister Barr said that contracts will be signed & work will commence before the next ACT LA election.

So, given the more detailed info about the tram that has been revealed since the last election + the fact that the ACT Labor Govt is clearly going ahead with the tram project – I can see no point in having debates or discussions about the thing anymore. Its essentially too late once contracts are signed.

The ballot box will sort it out and show whether ACT voters have the intelligence & common sense to cut through the spin and see the lipstick being painted on the pig.

There are some signs that the remaining two bidding consortia will soon be one.
Do “call in” powers extend to projects like this?

Kim Fischer said :

Thanks to everyone for their comments.

It is important to have a debate and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I feel the economic and social arguments for and against have been thoroughly covered by others in the comments.

However anyone who would like to have further discussions is very welcome to email me on kim@kimfischer.com.au.

Yes – debate and gathering opinion is good – making decision without that is not good.

Little was know about the detail of the tram at the 2012 election – much, much more detail has come to light since then. The signing of contracts before the 2016 ACT LA election was apparently not even mentioned in the ACT Labor policy – as evidenced on RiotAct previously.

On Mark Partons radio show on 1206 late last week, Chief Minister Barr said that contracts will be signed & work will commence before the next ACT LA election.

So, given the more detailed info about the tram that has been revealed since the last election + the fact that the ACT Labor Govt is clearly going ahead with the tram project – I can see no point in having debates or discussions about the thing anymore. Its essentially too late once contracts are signed.

The ballot box will sort it out and show whether ACT voters have the intelligence & common sense to cut through the spin and see the lipstick being painted on the pig.

Thanks to everyone for their comments.

It is important to have a debate and everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I feel the economic and social arguments for and against have been thoroughly covered by others in the comments.

However anyone who would like to have further discussions is very welcome to email me on kim@kimfischer.com.au.

Charlotte Harper said :

…I’ll drop her a line to let her know she’s been missed.

An OP who posts newspeak on a controversial topic like Kim did and then not respond without prompting makes me think very lowly of the them as a aspiring candidate.

I live in the Ginninderra electorate, but there is no way I’m voting for Kim if all she has to offer is what amounts to a puff piece press release on a topic close to residents hearts and has no desire to actually engage with us. Imagine how little engagement we will get from Kim if she is actually elected.

Kim Fischer said :

I write articles with the goal of fostering thought and debate. I am pleased when people comment, but don’t feel it is generally my role to take part.

That sounds exactly like the ACT branch of the Labor party’s approach to ‘Consultation’. They talk, we respond and raise points, but we get no response.

Kim Fischer said :

…Canberra needs to keep evolving as it grows.

While I agree with you Canberra needs to try new things, I’d hate to think the example of the recent new suburbs is an evolution we should be happy with in a ‘planned city’.

Kim Fischer said :

True, block sizes in new developments are becoming smaller but that is happening right across the country, not just in Canberra.

Becoming smaller? They almost could not be any smaller! The gall of saying you can have a garden suburb when blocks are 400m2 and houses are built right to the fence is astonishingly patronising. My view is our local ALP is only interested in what fills the government coffers in the short term and what keeps their developer mates happy.

Why should the further out suburbs (and lets face it, West Belconnen could not possibly get further out) be the highest density areas? Who thinks it’s smart to build high density housing >40mins from the city?

Canberra should learn from the mistakes of Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane. Not excuse poor choices because it has already happened across the country.

Also, people here have brought up many valid economic points against light-rail. For you as OP not to respond to them makes it seem like you don’t have a logical/valid response and you just parrot the party line.

As a life long Labor voting family, you are not dissuading us from voting independent for the first time.

wildturkeycanoe8:25 am 03 Dec 15

rubaiyat said :

as people are weaned off the noisy, polluting and dangerous cars.

but the ugliness, pollution and deadly environment of cars is just fine!

Just as trams are no longer noisy and polluting, so too are cars becoming environmentally friendly, quiet and safer. I actually think cars need some kind of device to make them audible, as you could walk out in front of an electric one without hearing it coming.

rubaiyat said :

The stops are not the destination, the neighbourhoods are. The tram is just the means of circulating around them. The result is obvious. Melbourne streets vs Parramatta Road.

The tram is not a means to circulate around them, it is a means to get TO them. Once there, you need to catch another form of transport to get to your actual destination, on top of the alternate means of transport required to get to the first stop from your home. I still have not seen a survey of any sort showing how many people actually commute directly from Gungahlin to Civic, as opposed to Gungahlin to somewhere else VIA Civic. Are the patronage numbers required to keep the tram viable really as high as expected?

rubaiyat said :

Nothing stopping Canberra making all the tram stops an expression of our creativity, like the Moscow underground, or the Barcelona Rambla, or the Paris Metro.

Like the pitiful efforts of our present box shaped, glass covered bus stops scattered around Canberra requiring constant window replacements thanks to vandals? Surely we need a new design team if the tram stops are to be anything other than wet, windy tunnels of misery.
Your examples listed, are exactly the type of metal and glass, non-sheltered stops that look ugly and are not functional.

wildturkeycanoe said :

rubaiyat said :

This after watching the huge queue backed up through Majura on the weekend. My son tells me he has to endure this every day going to work, trying to cross Canberra.

Just how much can you lie to yourself? This is what we have with 385,000 people and the new suburbs of Molonglo unfinished and West Belconnen still to happen. Add a few hundred thousand more residents all optimistically cramming into the roads, expect today to be different from the day before and the day before that.

This is the way it really is, …and getting worse.

So your son is going across town to work and you are going across town [different direction] for hospital visits. Would the tram have got either of you there? No, you’d still have needed a bus or even two different trams plus a bus or two. The problem isn’t that cars are the root of all evil and causing these traffic jams, the problem is that everybody needs to fill the roads to get somewhere else in Canberra. Eliminate the need to travel at peak hour and you eliminate the need for mass public transport, simple.
When your family exits the house do you all walk through the front door at the same time? No, it’d block the entrance. So why do we as a society insist on squeezing everyone through the same opening simultaneously, on a regular basis? Stagger work hours and the issues won’t be so bad that we need to have a solution.The bus network could easily cope then and make room for the rest of us who do travel for other reasons.
As for the tram being anything other than a commuting option, I totally disagree. All the images of the Gold Coast tram I could find show nothing more than a barren concrete wasteland. Where is all the green space, the aesthetically appealing hipster hangouts? There aren’t any pictures of shady trees near the tramway because the power lines prevent anything growing beneath. How does one feel the sense of “community” around a set of tracks? The stops are desolate and boring. Hopefully that isn’t the vision they have for Northbourne, which currently has an abundance of green grass and tall shady trees.

Work hours are already staggered and we still have the problem.

The problem is the bad design which can’t and isn’t fixed by throwing billions at roads. Essential destinations in Canberra have been plunked willy nilly anywhere, with people having to make their own way there the best they can, though increasingly bad traffic. The awful Gungahlin Drive has cut off both sides of its route, we tried getting through where we used to be able to go neatly to Calvary to find it was impossible and it all ends up in wrong way or dead end roads now. May as well be the Grand Canyon between one side and the other. Beautiful concrete landscaping btw. Beyond the “desolate and boring” trams stops you claim. Nasty and dangerous comes more to mind.

The Gold Coast Light Rail was built in the middle of a pug ugly road. The road was ugly and remains ugly, but along the Light Rail the route is already transforming the sides with cafe’s and interesting public areas. The ABC report last Friday showed that just in the short year the Light Rail has been operational, the cafes and interest is creeping into a Gold Coast strip which essentially had none. It looked just like Nourthbourne Ave looks in the heart of Canberra, desolate painted up windows that everybody avoids.

People are changing and switching to the more pleasant Light Rail alternative, as people are weaned off the noisy, polluting and dangerous cars. When the full route is operational the endless nasty traffic will be diminished. Certainly it will be nowhere as bad as if it remained the ONLY way to get around the Gold Coast.

To see what will be happening with the Gungahlin Light Rail look at the Melbourne tram running up the green verge of Victoria Street North Melbourne, between the trees, and the Barcelona, Graz, Zurich trams (just a few off the top of my head) where grass is sown through the tracks. Modern trams also have various technologies to eliminate overhead wires, but even when they have them they are on slim neat shortish poles.

It is not like roads are free of much taller Light poles and forests of street signs and parking signs, not to mention the grossly ugly kerbside parking and smelly car parks. You are just falling into the one eyed trap of anything that looks or behaves like a tram is evil, but the ugliness, pollution and deadly environment of cars is just fine!

The stops are not the destination, the neighbourhoods are. The tram is just the means of circulating around them. The result is obvious. Melbourne streets vs Parramatta Road.

Demand a higher standard of the stops if that concerns you. You are already demanding exciting beautiful design for all the deadly intersections, traffic lights, gigantic road signs, endless bitumen and concrete, parking meters and hordes of cars either clogging up the roads or are shoved in every free nook and cranny, especially on the grass and landscaping, for the vast amount of time they are just cluttering up the cities, doing nothing.

Nothing stopping Canberra making all the tram stops an expression of our creativity, like the Moscow underground, or the Barcelona Rambla, or the Paris Metro. If the argument was about the quality of the result, not its simple necessity we could make real progress.

wildturkeycanoe6:45 am 03 Dec 15

Kim Fischer said :

Hi all
I write articles with the goal of fostering thought and debate. I am pleased when people comment, but don’t feel it is generally my role to take part.
.

Seems to be the way politics works nowadays. The politicians start a “discussion” and throw in a few ideas they like, then bail out while the rest of the country argues about them. In the background, they already have planned to implement their own suggestion before the idea was thrown out there and once it is announced, they call it “consultation” and say it was what the voters wanted.

“One conversation we need to have more is about the function of the Capital Metro tram as more than just a commuter solution.” Does “we” mean us and not you Kim?

Seeing that you are still reading these posts, can you answer me a question regarding this statement, “The social opportunities unlocked by the tram are substantial”?
What kind of social opportunities exactly does a tram create? If you are talking about coffee shops and bars, how does a tram create them any differently to a bus, which can stop at the same locations? Perhaps you mean some kind of tram related sports activities done as a group, such as “Race the tram to the next stop on your scooter”, “How many people can we fit into the tram”, “Who can hang their joggers on the overhead lines?” or “How many minutes late will the 8:45 be?”.

All the “feel good” garbage surrounding the tram is just BS, empty words promising a heavenly environment where rainbows and unicorns fill the space that once was green parkland, whilst emptying an already empty purse at the expense of vital infrastructure across the rest of 95% of Canberra.

Kim Fischer said :

Hi all

I write articles with the goal of fostering thought and debate. I am pleased when people comment, but don’t feel it is generally my role to take part.

Canberra needs to keep evolving as it grows. Mixed-use is an important part of the picture, as are sustainable transport arrangements. True, block sizes in new developments are becoming smaller but that is happening right across the country, not just in Canberra.

Yes but not so schizophrenic as in Canberra, where because the Government is actual the biggest land speculator, it breaks its own stated policies, town planning and common sense to make inner city blocks large, and distant suburbia tiny. Defeating the infill development it “says” it wants.

The Government also “claims” it is for sustainable, environmental design but enforces regulations and land division that make that practically impossible. In fact any developments it builds itself are arse backwards, with their back to the sun and usually facing right into the bitter cold winter winds.

How do you explain the Government policies like Molonglo which has virtually no public transport except a slow bus to Woden, and no plan, nor land set aside for future rights of way for the same light rail you are saying is essential to Gungahlin?

What about West Belconnen, an addition to an area already neglected and remote, that is going over the border into NSW?

Even the painfully slow progress on realigning Constitution Ave seems to have no plan for the proposed Light Rail supposedly going to run down it. Are you going to rip it all up again when you FINALLY have a transport plan?

Also how do you explain all the ad hoc developments like Ikea, excised out of the previous plans as a “special case”? Or the endless alienation of public green space for car parking or simply being flogged off like you did to 75% of Glebe Park?

Is this “evolution”, or desperate uncoordinated grabs for money, or favours to people with clout?

Hi all

I write articles with the goal of fostering thought and debate. I am pleased when people comment, but don’t feel it is generally my role to take part.

Canberra needs to keep evolving as it grows. Mixed-use is an important part of the picture, as are sustainable transport arrangements. True, block sizes in new developments are becoming smaller but that is happening right across the country, not just in Canberra.

wildturkeycanoe8:59 pm 02 Dec 15

rubaiyat said :

This after watching the huge queue backed up through Majura on the weekend. My son tells me he has to endure this every day going to work, trying to cross Canberra.

Just how much can you lie to yourself? This is what we have with 385,000 people and the new suburbs of Molonglo unfinished and West Belconnen still to happen. Add a few hundred thousand more residents all optimistically cramming into the roads, expect today to be different from the day before and the day before that.

This is the way it really is, …and getting worse.

So your son is going across town to work and you are going across town [different direction] for hospital visits. Would the tram have got either of you there? No, you’d still have needed a bus or even two different trams plus a bus or two. The problem isn’t that cars are the root of all evil and causing these traffic jams, the problem is that everybody needs to fill the roads to get somewhere else in Canberra. Eliminate the need to travel at peak hour and you eliminate the need for mass public transport, simple.
When your family exits the house do you all walk through the front door at the same time? No, it’d block the entrance. So why do we as a society insist on squeezing everyone through the same opening simultaneously, on a regular basis? Stagger work hours and the issues won’t be so bad that we need to have a solution.The bus network could easily cope then and make room for the rest of us who do travel for other reasons.
As for the tram being anything other than a commuting option, I totally disagree. All the images of the Gold Coast tram I could find show nothing more than a barren concrete wasteland. Where is all the green space, the aesthetically appealing hipster hangouts? There aren’t any pictures of shady trees near the tramway because the power lines prevent anything growing beneath. How does one feel the sense of “community” around a set of tracks? The stops are desolate and boring. Hopefully that isn’t the vision they have for Northbourne, which currently has an abundance of green grass and tall shady trees.

rubaiyat said :

Typically I saw a guy in a very large 4WD take a short cut along the side green verge to get around the the long queue of cars.

No wonder the “Garden City” is a compacted dirt bowl wherever the extremely self centred choose to strike.

Never walking anywhere, they don’t even see the results of their handiwork.

Hate it when those clowns do that. That kind of “thrity seconds of my life is far more important than nice grass on public land” attitude. Selfish and self-centered.

rosscoact said :

farq said :

I would especially like to hear Kim’s views on how you can have a garden suburb when the blocks are at most 400m2 and the houses are all 200m2.

Not my idea or a garden suburb.

Do some research into planning ie Garden City and the pox of Garden Suburbs. WBG designed Canberra as a Garden City, Garden Suburbs are the opposite of Garden Cities.

Right on rossco.
And tram wires and poles are not compatible with garden cities either.

Typically I saw a guy in a very large 4WD take a short cut along the side green verge to get around the the long queue of cars.

No wonder the “Garden City” is a compacted dirt bowl wherever the extremely self centred choose to strike.

Never walking anywhere, they don’t even see the results of their handiwork.

Just came back from an early morning appointment at Calvary and went through 3 sets of kilometre long car queues “That we don’t have”.

2 of them on the very expensive roadworks on the Gungahlin Freeway/Parkes Way that seem to have done nothing but shift a few deck chairs.

Looking to the left and right not a car with even 2 occupants, just ours.

This after watching the huge queue backed up through Majura on the weekend. My son tells me he has to endure this every day going to work, trying to cross Canberra.

Just how much can you lie to yourself? This is what we have with 385,000 people and the new suburbs of Molonglo unfinished and West Belconnen still to happen. Add a few hundred thousand more residents all optimistically cramming into the roads, expect today to be different from the day before and the day before that.

This is the way it really is, …and getting worse.

farq said :

I would especially like to hear Kim’s views on how you can have a garden suburb when the blocks are at most 400m2 and the houses are all 200m2.

Not my idea or a garden suburb.

Do some research into planning ie Garden City and the pox of Garden Suburbs. WBG designed Canberra as a Garden City, Garden Suburbs are the opposite of Garden Cities.

I would especially like to hear Kim’s views on how you can have a garden suburb when the blocks are at most 400m2 and the houses are all 200m2.

Not my idea or a garden suburb.

Interesting that the OP (Kim Fischer) has not posted anything back in response to the thread….

You would think a candidate would be willing to debate and talk about the topic. I would hate to think that Kim was just making a post for the chance to practice rhetoric without engaging in the debate.

Charlotte Harper12:11 pm 02 Dec 15

She’s probably been pretty busy juggling the candidacy with her existing commitments given it was only announced the other day. I’ll drop her a line to let her know she’s been missed.

wildturkeycanoe8:49 pm 01 Dec 15

Kim Fischer said :

It mostly comes down to the fact that trams can transport more people than buses in a given corridor. The capacity to transport more people makes higher density developments more viable.

So what is the order of things – higher density housing in the inner north means we need a tram, or we need higher density housing in the inner north to justify spending a billion dollars on a tram?
As I see it, the government has been doing a lot of this “vibrant, local communities where people live, play and work” type of rhetoric going on to try and convince us of the need for a tram. We don’t have this Utopian corridor to keep the tram afloat, so in the meantime [how many years] the ratepayers will be stung more and more, thus bleeding the rest of Canberra dry while the developers try to create something “sustainable”. I’m getting sick and tired of hearing all these warm and fuzzy terms, focused on one small part of Canberra, knowing like the rest of the sensible people that other vital services such as health and education will suffer at the hands of idealism.
If the rates do indeed go through the roof so that our bankrupt overlords can pay off an antiquated transport system [yes it is old school thinking, how long have trams been around?], it may see us relocate to somewhere that the representatives of the people actually listen to the people instead of shoving their ideas down their throats.

KentFitch said :

rubaiyat said :

KentFitch said :

They are easy to find:

http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/57_city – 8 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/56_city – 8 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/58_city# – 9 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/200_fyshwick – 44 services

That’s 69 services in 150 minutes – more frequent than one every 2min 20 sec.

Except for the 200, none of those are the Light Rail route.

All these services take currently people from Gungahlin to Civic, all travel down Flemington Rd and Northbourne Av. And if the proposed light rail is built, none of them will. They represent the current carrying capacity of ACTION in the AM peak. If you recall, you objected to the comparison of passenger capacity now with ACTION and with the light rail. I have demonstrated that seated passenger capacity between Gungahlin and Civic will drop a lot, and per-head of population, even seated plus standing will drop a lot if light-rail goes ahead.
(But even with _just_ the 44 x 200 services in 150 minutes and ignoring the other 25 Gungahlin to Civic services, what interval do you calculate? Is it more frequent than 5 minutes?)

When you say: “There will be feeder services to the light rail, perhaps a bit better cross connected than currently and as the Light Rail will be able to maintain a tighter schedule, a better intermode swap”, are you suggesting that requiring people to transfer from feeder services to tram in Gungahlin, and from tram to bus in Civic is a “better intermode swap” then letting people stay on their bus to where they are going?

When you say: “The Capital Metro says ‘likely’ and ‘probable’ capacities ..” are you suggesting I instead speculate, or imagine what I’d like to be the case rather than using the “likely” and “probable” information supplied? I wonder if you are also a closet climate denier – do you think perhaps ‘likely’ and ‘probable’ climate affects are used by climate scientists to “fudge” assorted statistics?

When you say: “..which you have added to your assorted fudged statistics”, I wonder why each time you claim something is “fudged”, and I give clear evidence it is not, you change direction, make a generalised claim unsupported by evidence, whilst never acknowledging your error. I do not judge you, but neither do I understand your methods.

When you say: “They have not said what models nor articulations”, I note CM have lodged a development application with, for example, their planned schedules and vehicle capacity and layout. These may change, of course, but I am only using their best information. I would rather do that than make outlandish and improbable guesses. Yes, they may decide to rip up the station plans and support longer trams, and respecify the power requirements to support sub-3-minute service frequencies, but they have given no such indications.

When you say: “You have got the Munster bus example exactly wrong. The peak hour bus in the peak hour traffic is largely full. The peak hour car in the peak hour traffic still has only 1.1 occupants. Simple observation tells you that”, I note that again, you seem to be deliberately chosing to misunderstand the point of that simple example, which is that the simple geometry governing comparisons between bus and car is not totally immutable. If (and only if) an effective car-sharing system can be devised which greatly increases that 1.1 number then cars can approach the “spatial efficiency” of buses. I am not saying they can match it, and they can not match rail, and for that reason, shared autonomous vehicles are extremely unlikely to be capable of transport densities of bus and rail. If Canberra needed anything like those densities, I hope we’d have put in heavy rail decades ago. But we are a small city with excellent road infrastructure. How best to use scarce community resources to meet the demands we have is an economic, social and engineering problem, it is not an ideological one.

When you say: “I notice also in one of your assumptions that you have ’12 fully occupied autonomous cars’. So actually 100% occupancy! Snug! Everybody gets to know everyone I assume? As they will by then all be quite obese that will only be 4, not 5, occupants in the car all sweating, packed in together”, I start to worry that you may not actually like your fellow citizens very much. Yes, we are all flawed, but through our diversity a great strength and richness emerges. Will the tram refuse boarding to obese people? Will their sweating obesity be less offensive because they will be likely to be standing very close to you, hanging from a strap? If your point is “there will be some cars with 4 people sitting in them in peak periods”, that’s right! You see, 4 people in a car is very spatially efficient.

I think however, you were getting outraged that the model had cars with 4.8 people in them, and now you see there isn’t, you are getting more outraged!

When you say “Have you ever used these systems? You really are making up a lot of stuff and seeing impossibilities that don’t exist, just for the heck of it”, again, I repeatedly ask to find out what you think I am making up, and you just change direction.

When you say ” None of this needs your incredibly convoluted ‘calculations’ made up of mostly plucked from the air numbers”, again I ask (and apologize for how tedious this must be for RiotAct readers – I really am trying to keep it short), which numbers are they? Is it the number of ACTION bus services based on current ACTION timetables? Is it the planned frequency of the tram? Is it the capacity of the tram based on CM’s own documents?

When you say: “The same with your environmental fudge. Steel wheels on steel rails use 2% of the energy of rubber tyres on bitumen. Fact. A fact well known for almost 2 hundred years, along with most of what you painstakingly calculate using dubious assumptions can all be culled from countless real life examples.”, I am at a complete loss to understand your reference. Are you suggesting that CM’s estimate of 61,000 tons of greenhouse gas to construct the light rail is wrong? Are you suggesting that CM’s estimates of increased traffic congestion along the route and the greenhouse gas they will cause are wrong? If so, how come CM gets so much wrong? If you are just upset that as more is revealed about the planned tram, the more it disappoints, then I understand, as I feel that too.

When you say: “You seem to simultaneously demand that we know everything about the proposed Light Rail down to the last rivet, and yet object to the negotiations having got as far as they have. Which is it?” I again suspect sarcasm as a deflection against an unsubstantiated argument, because I think nobody cares about rivets, but do care a lot about service quality, based on service frequency and capacity. CM have published a great deal on service frequency and capacity, and I have analysed it. Yes, the results are far from what was promised and what we hoped to imagine, but it is unhelpful to shoot the messenger.

When you say: “4 wheels good, 2 bogies bad?”, you are aware the 33m Bombardier Flexity has 5 bogies? I think the Urbos 3 33m version may also have 5 bogies? (Surely you didn’t expect a dunce like me to notice a reference to Orwell?)

When you say: “I dodn’t see your costing on all the autonomous vehicles and freeways, vehicles which will have to be built to higher standard than private cars, at greater expense, far greater than even the Light Rail”, for vehicle capital and operational cost model I refer you to http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/model.html#config (for the Canberra simulation) and this article in Nature Climate Change from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which contains an independently calculated assessment with very similar results: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n9/full/nclimate2685.html and an assessment of costs by Deloitte which is also very similar: http://dupress.com/articles/future-of-mobility-transportation-technology/

Re “freeways”, the goal of a shared fleet of autonomous cars is to use less of them, and by increasing (in the Canberra simulation) people per car from 1.1 to 1.7 (and around 2 to popular AM peak destinations), this they achieve: that is, they use existing infrastructure much more efficiently.

When you say: “Who will finance the vehicles?”, I thank you for a very interesting question. The simple answer is “people who want to make money”, which is why the management consultants and investment bankers are swarming over this area. The economic models (such as those referenced above and many more linked from the Canberra simulation “home page”) shows there is lots of cash-flow and potentially surplus in supplying cheap, on-demand, 24×7, door-to-door transport. Electric cars have already proven to be very cheap to operate and maintain, but the capital cost (relative to petrol cars) is high: this can be amortized if they travel many productive km per day. But I hope they will be financed and run by, and the profits accrue to, cooperatives or the state. Transport shapes our lives, and I can see many ways in which public ownership will allow a better mobility-on-demand service to be shaped for the public good. I highly recommend this short essay: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/02/chose-your-own-utopia-what-will-we-make-of-driverless-cars/

When you say: “Or how on earth you are going to get people to share rides, particularly women or children getting into a vehicle with no driver, but probably a strange man or two”, these are real fears people I know have now traveling on Sydney trains, and even on ACTION. Like UBER, the identities of the passengers are known. Only during peak periods are cars shared – outside peak, you book the car for yourself and any chosen traveling companions. During peak, sure, some people may prefer or insist on traveling with fellow-women. Cars will be linked, and will have cameras. But of course, identities will be stolen, cameras smashed (but detected) and crimes will be committed before help arrives. A quick search of Google for attacks on public transport shows this isnt a unique problem, and it is exactly the type of issue I wish we were discussing rather than how the tram won’t have a 6 minute frequency.

When you say: “Will the autonomous vehicles eliminate private non-autonomous vehicles and how will they interact with them? Autonomous vehicles may avoid collisions but human drivers won’t with them. Will buses be eliminated, or will this just be another cost on top of the private cars and buses? So many obvious questions just off the top of my head.”, I say “congratulations” these are the issues being discussed now in many jurisdictions, by many transport planners, by many academics and auto manufacturers. These issues will be decided with or without us, so let us engage them.

If you have a look through these posts you will see that I have done my own extensive research complete with full references. On everything from alternate transport capacities, transport safety studies, census information, car costings, energy usage down to even the material content of the alternative transport solutions. Even laying out my entire calculations.

I will take more time to read through your links at length, but find it hard going and just on quick read it is easy to spot the “Bumble Bee” proofs. I’ve been around long enough to recognise the Wrong Way signs in front of all the rabbit holes.

There is lots of real world data out there and I recognise the American sources for the “impact energy” calculations amongst other tracts. Frankly total and utter tosh. Immediately seen for what it is by the absence of critical analysis of rolling, jack knifing, out of control trucks which actually do kill large numbers of people every year.

The plain fact is the Real World demonstrates the Fear & B.S. for what it is. The same with the energy usage, all that has been done to death many times, and I highly advise you not to rely so heavily on American data for many reasons, mostly because they are quite unlike European and Australian examples and because they come from a different cultural expectation than us. The only thing I rely on American examples for is that they have done anything at all, being as extensively targeted by the Anti-Climate Change lobby as they have been.

IMHO the whole Autonomous Car thing is a huge furphy. Just another Clean Coal smokescreen. The people who don’t want to share, will still not want to share and as I have pointed out Autonomous Cars will mean even more useless car shuffling, without occupants, adding empty cars to roads which already have near empty cars saturating the freeways. They just are a way of putting all the low skill new migrant taxi-drivers out of their jobs, the grand title is just a marketing rebranding to fool the slow to catch on.

Given all the Stranger Danger warnings and the choice of being on public transport with a crowd, or at minimum a driver, driverless cars break the rule we are teaching kids and women. Regrettably I see them as a huge terrorist opportunity, just like drones, that is going to bite everybody hard, you won’t even need to have the total conviction of suicide bombers to use them to attack innocent targets.

Also they will be an extremely expensive and inefficient form of transport, more so even than cars are already.

Lastly they do nothing about urban sprawl, either excusing it or fostering it. No matter what the form of transport, forcing people to travel unnecessarily and avoid personal exertion in heavily trafficked and divided cities is the problem we are trying to avoid. The big lie here is that the higher density inner city is being used to justify the Light Rail. It isn’t. The aim is to have people stop spreading out into our green space and stay closer to everything a city has to offer. The Light Rail is there to stop the city choking on its own cars, and repeating the mistakes of every other city on this planet, which it is already starting to do.

rommeldog56 said :

rubaiyat said :

There is a reason, clear as day, why Northbourne Ave cutting through the city has killed off everything to the left and right of both sides of the city. Nobody wants to be anywhere near the traffic.

The ACT Governments own EIS report states that traffic congestion will increase (especially along Northborne Ave) because of the Tram encouraging higher density along the route. The traffic will still be there – even more congested, apparently. You don’t need a b$1 tram to increase density/widen mixed use developments.

Well, this is the remarkable achievement of the poorly conceived tram route: if you look at the tables in the CM EIS, Traffic and Transport Appendix B in Volume 3, Part 5 (
http://www.planning.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/41343/Capital_Metro_Light_Rail_Stage_1_Draft_EIS_Volume_03_Part_5-Traffic_and_Transport-Appendix_B.pdf ) you see that there are typically slight decreases in traffic volumes, but massive increases in delays at intersections (due to tram signal priority and how signal preemption destroys signal phasing both north-south and east-west). For example, looking at the 2021 AM peak forecasts from CM for the Barry/Cooyong/Northbourne intersection. Without the tram, CM forecast 4605 vehicles through that intersection, with a cumulative delay of 186,164 seconds (51.7 hours). With the tram, CM forecast 4485 vehicles through that intersection, with a cumulative delay of 291977 seconds (81.1 hours). Intersection delays west on Barry (Marcus Clarke) and east on Cooyong (Mort, Lonsdale..) also increase because the signals do not clear the queue.

As a result, greenhouse gas emissions from idly vehicles increase proportionately. Across the network modelled by CM, these increases are very significant: http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/faq.html#ghg

So yes, not only is the barrier across Northbourne raised by including 2 tram lines to the 6 car lanes, the whole place becomes noisier, hotter and a bigger sight for the combustion of petrol and diesel. Good news for Caltex, I guess!

Things will get dramatically worse, as the Stage 2 DA concedes: http://203.9.249.10/e-registerfiles/pubnote/pdf/ENVIRONMENTALREPORT-201528508-TRAFFIC_AND_TRANSPORT-01.pdf – see esp fig 4.1, 4.2, 4.4. This report reads as a confession that the proposed project will create extensive and severe traffic congestion; it is unclear whether the authors are asking for absolution or hoping for a death-sentence. From the “executive summary”, page vi:

” …in several locations delays and queues could result in a compromised performance of the wider road network”

I’m certain Ministers Corbell and Rattenbury are aghast at this outcome (one of the many disappointments that have come to light with the EIS and DevelopmentApplication), and it is in our own best interests to give them room to exit with from light-rail grace. At least they had a go.

justin heywood10:34 am 01 Dec 15

rubaiyat said :

justin heywood said :

Instead we get a $billion dollar thought bubble.

There you go spoiling it all again.

Just stick to the $768 million which includes a $178 million contingency.

btw How is the $300 million dollar Majura Parkway working out? Solved the traffic jams past the Airport and up Majura Road?

If you’re going to get excited every time anybody questions Capital Metro’s ‘budget’ , you are going to be a busy little person.

Almost every commentator assumes it will blow out to a $billion, and there is good evidence that it will.
But anyone who has even glanced at the business case knows why the official budget has to stay at it’s current level.

….because the more the budget blows out, the more ridiculous the ‘Business Case’ looks.

rubaiyat said :

There is a reason, clear as day, why Northbourne Ave cutting through the city has killed off everything to the left and right of both sides of the city. Nobody wants to be anywhere near the traffic.

The ACT Governments own EIS report states that traffic congestion will increase (especially along Northborne Ave) because of the Tram encouraging higher density along the route. The traffic will still be there – even more congested, apparently. You don’t need a b$1 tram to increase density/widen mixed use developments.

rubaiyat said :

justin heywood said :

Instead we get a $billion dollar thought bubble.

There you go spoiling it all again.

Just stick to the $768 million which includes a $178 million contingency.

btw How is the $300 million dollar Majura Parkway working out? Solved the traffic jams past the Airport and up Majura Road?

The m$768 will increase due to the ACT Gov’t underwriting passenger numbers, claw back from the PPP consortia, unforeseens, because the PPP has to carry the cost until the 1st tram runs (because to keep the expenditure off the books, the ACT Govt will not be making any payments until then – not even progress payments !), return to PPP consortia shareholders, does not include infrastructure costs + cost of Capital Metro itself which have to be met by the ACT Government/Ratepayers. Already, as I recall, the ACT Government has spent well over m$150 (?) on Capital Metro, consultants, surveys, polls, studies, cardboard tram models, etc. As far as I know, there has been no expenditure to date on infrastructure enablers such as power stations, or roadworks or moving what ever has to be moved under Northborne Avenue. So, m$768 will become b$1 + – it is inevitable. Its much, much more than just the cost of the payments made to the PPP.

rubaiyat said :

KentFitch said :

They are easy to find:

http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/57_city – 8 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/56_city – 8 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/58_city# – 9 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/200_fyshwick – 44 services

That’s 69 services in 150 minutes – more frequent than one every 2min 20 sec.

Except for the 200, none of those are the Light Rail route.

All these services take currently people from Gungahlin to Civic, all travel down Flemington Rd and Northbourne Av. And if the proposed light rail is built, none of them will. They represent the current carrying capacity of ACTION in the AM peak. If you recall, you objected to the comparison of passenger capacity now with ACTION and with the light rail. I have demonstrated that seated passenger capacity between Gungahlin and Civic will drop a lot, and per-head of population, even seated plus standing will drop a lot if light-rail goes ahead.
(But even with _just_ the 44 x 200 services in 150 minutes and ignoring the other 25 Gungahlin to Civic services, what interval do you calculate? Is it more frequent than 5 minutes?)

When you say: “There will be feeder services to the light rail, perhaps a bit better cross connected than currently and as the Light Rail will be able to maintain a tighter schedule, a better intermode swap”, are you suggesting that requiring people to transfer from feeder services to tram in Gungahlin, and from tram to bus in Civic is a “better intermode swap” then letting people stay on their bus to where they are going?

When you say: “The Capital Metro says ‘likely’ and ‘probable’ capacities ..” are you suggesting I instead speculate, or imagine what I’d like to be the case rather than using the “likely” and “probable” information supplied? I wonder if you are also a closet climate denier – do you think perhaps ‘likely’ and ‘probable’ climate affects are used by climate scientists to “fudge” assorted statistics?

When you say: “..which you have added to your assorted fudged statistics”, I wonder why each time you claim something is “fudged”, and I give clear evidence it is not, you change direction, make a generalised claim unsupported by evidence, whilst never acknowledging your error. I do not judge you, but neither do I understand your methods.

When you say: “They have not said what models nor articulations”, I note CM have lodged a development application with, for example, their planned schedules and vehicle capacity and layout. These may change, of course, but I am only using their best information. I would rather do that than make outlandish and improbable guesses. Yes, they may decide to rip up the station plans and support longer trams, and respecify the power requirements to support sub-3-minute service frequencies, but they have given no such indications.

When you say: “You have got the Munster bus example exactly wrong. The peak hour bus in the peak hour traffic is largely full. The peak hour car in the peak hour traffic still has only 1.1 occupants. Simple observation tells you that”, I note that again, you seem to be deliberately chosing to misunderstand the point of that simple example, which is that the simple geometry governing comparisons between bus and car is not totally immutable. If (and only if) an effective car-sharing system can be devised which greatly increases that 1.1 number then cars can approach the “spatial efficiency” of buses. I am not saying they can match it, and they can not match rail, and for that reason, shared autonomous vehicles are extremely unlikely to be capable of transport densities of bus and rail. If Canberra needed anything like those densities, I hope we’d have put in heavy rail decades ago. But we are a small city with excellent road infrastructure. How best to use scarce community resources to meet the demands we have is an economic, social and engineering problem, it is not an ideological one.

When you say: “I notice also in one of your assumptions that you have ’12 fully occupied autonomous cars’. So actually 100% occupancy! Snug! Everybody gets to know everyone I assume? As they will by then all be quite obese that will only be 4, not 5, occupants in the car all sweating, packed in together”, I start to worry that you may not actually like your fellow citizens very much. Yes, we are all flawed, but through our diversity a great strength and richness emerges. Will the tram refuse boarding to obese people? Will their sweating obesity be less offensive because they will be likely to be standing very close to you, hanging from a strap? If your point is “there will be some cars with 4 people sitting in them in peak periods”, that’s right! You see, 4 people in a car is very spatially efficient. I think however, you were getting outraged that the model had cars with 4.8 people in them, and now you see there isn’t, you are getting more outraged!

When you say “Have you ever used these systems? You really are making up a lot of stuff and seeing impossibilities that don’t exist, just for the heck of it”, again, I repeatedly ask to find out what you think I am making up, and you just change direction. If I were a sensitive type, I’d think you were actually accusing me of deliberate fraud, or being contemptible or stupid. But I think instead you are trapped.

When you say ” None of this needs your incredibly convoluted ‘calculations’ made up of mostly plucked from the air numbers”, again I ask (and apologize for how tedious this must be for RiotAct readers – I really am trying to keep it short), which numbers are they? Is it the number of ACTION bus services based on current ACTION timetables? Is it the planned frequency of the tram? Is it the capacity of the tram based on CM’s own documents?

When you say: “The same with your environmental fudge. Steel wheels on steel rails use 2% of the energy of rubber tyres on bitumen. Fact. A fact well known for almost 2 hundred years, along with most of what you painstakingly calculate using dubious assumptions can all be culled from countless real life examples.”, I am at a complete loss to understand your reference. Are you suggesting that CM’s estimate of 61,000 tons of greenhouse gas to construct the light rail is wrong? Are you suggesting that CM’s estimates of increased traffic congestion along the route and the greenhouse gas they will cause are wrong? If so, how come CM gets so much wrong? If you are just upset that as more is revealed about the planned tram, the more it disappoints, then I understand, as I feel that too.

When you say: “You seem to simultaneously demand that we know everything about the proposed Light Rail down to the last rivet, and yet object to the negotiations having got as far as they have. Which is it?” I again suspect sarcasm as a deflection against an unsubstantiated argument, because I think nobody cares about rivets, but do care a lot about service quality, based on service frequency and capacity. CM have published a great deal on service frequency and capacity, and I have analysed it. Yes, the results are far from what was promised and what we hoped to imagine, but it is unhelpful to shoot the messenger.

When you say: “4 wheels good, 2 bogies bad?”, you are aware the 33m Bombardier Flexity has 5 bogies? I think the Urbos 3 33m version may also have 5 bogies? (Surely you didn’t expect a dunce like me to notice a reference to Orwell?)

When you say: “I dodn’t see your costing on all the autonomous vehicles and freeways, vehicles which will have to be built to higher standard than private cars, at greater expense, far greater than even the Light Rail”, for vehicle capital and operational cost model I refer you to http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/model.html#config (for the Canberra simulation) and this article in Nature Climate Change from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which contains an independently calculated assessment with very similar results: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n9/full/nclimate2685.html and an assessment of costs by Deloitte which is also very similar: http://dupress.com/articles/future-of-mobility-transportation-technology/

Re “freeways”, the goal of a shared fleet of autonomous cars is to use less of them, and by increasing (in the Canberra simulation) people per car from 1.1 to 1.7 (and around 2 to popular AM peak destinations), this they achieve: that is, they use existing infrastructure much more efficiently.

When you say: “Who will finance the vehicles?”, I thank you for a very interesting question. The simple answer is “people who want to make money”, which is why the management consultants and investment bankers are swarming over this area. The economic models (such as those referenced above and many more linked from the Canberra simulation “home page”) shows there is lots of cash-flow and potentially surplus in supplying cheap, on-demand, 24×7, door-to-door transport. Electric cars have already proven to be very cheap to operate and maintain, but the capital cost (relative to petrol cars) is high: this can be amortized if they travel many productive km per day. But I hope they will be financed and run by, and the profits accrue to, cooperatives or the state. Transport shapes our lives, and I can see many ways in which public ownership will allow a better mobility-on-demand service to be shaped for the public good. I highly recommend this short essay: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/10/02/chose-your-own-utopia-what-will-we-make-of-driverless-cars/

When you say: “Or how on earth you are going to get people to share rides, particularly women or children getting into a vehicle with no driver, but probably a strange man or two”, these are real fears people I know have now traveling on Sydney trains, and even on ACTION. Like UBER, the identities of the passengers are known. Only during peak periods are cars shared – outside peak, you book the car for yourself and any chosen traveling companions. During peak, sure, some people may prefer or insist on traveling with fellow-women. Cars will be linked, and will have cameras. But of course, identities will be stolen, cameras smashed (but detected) and crimes will be committed before help arrives. A quick search of Google for attacks on public transport shows this isnt a unique problem, and it is exactly the type of issue I wish we were discussing rather than how the tram won’t have a 6 minute frequency.

When you say: “Will the autonomous vehicles eliminate private non-autonomous vehicles and how will they interact with them? Autonomous vehicles may avoid collisions but human drivers won’t with them. Will buses be eliminated, or will this just be another cost on top of the private cars and buses? So many obvious questions just off the top of my head.”, I say “congratulations” these are the issues being discussed now in many jurisdictions, by many transport planners, by many academics and auto manufactures. These issues will be decided with or without us, so let us engage them.

Back to the OP and to Kim Fisher, aspiring Labor MLA for Ginninderra at the next ACT Legislative Assembly election.

This is an issue you raised. There are questions posed in this discussion that I think would benefit from your answers/contributions/explanations.

KentFitch said :

They are easy to find:

http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/57_city – 8 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/56_city – 8 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/58_city# – 9 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/200_fyshwick – 44 services

That’s 69 services in 150 minutes – more frequent than one every 2min 20 sec.

Except for the 200, none of those are the Light Rail route.

There will be feeder services to the light rail, perhaps a bit better cross connected than currently and as the Light Rail will be able to maintain a tighter schedule, a better intermode swap.

The Capital Metro says “likely” and “probable” capacities which you have added to your assorted fudged statistics. They have not said what models nor articulations.

Melbourne and many of the International Trams/Light Rail systems are full of older passengers, often with their shopping trolleys, hopping on and off, particularly with the new low floor models. Like my father probably losing their licences at 70 and no longer hogging our roads at 40 km/hr, wandering dangerously on our roads. He is still using public transport at 91. Rough old buses, not even smooth as silk trams.

You have got the Munster bus example exactly wrong. The peak hour bus in the peak hour traffic is largely full. The peak hour car in the peak hour traffic still has only 1.1 occupants. Simple observation tells you that. THAT is why cars and freeways are a shockingly bad method of commuter transport. Just the cars to match the bus, take up multiple lanes of dangerous, uncrossable traffic, chopping up our cities and pouring out pollution and noise.

There is a reason, clear as day, why Northbourne Ave cutting through the city has killed off everything to the left and right of both sides of the city. Nobody wants to be anywhere near the traffic.

Compare that to anywhere where there are trams like Bourke Street or Swanston Street in Melbourne and now the main strip in the Gold Coast.

I notice also in one of your assumptions that you have “12 “fully occupied” autonomous cars”. So actually 100% occupancy! Snug! Everybody gets to know everyone I assume? As they will by then all be quite obese that will only be 4, not 5, occupants in the car all sweating, packed in together.

Have you ever used these systems? You really are making up a lot of stuff and seeing impossibilities that don’t exist, just for the heck of it. A quick check on the data tells you that the entire Melbourne tram/train network usually has ONE death a year. The vast NSW City plus Country rail and tram system shows an equally insignificant death rate. None of this needs your incredibly convoluted “calculations” made up of mostly plucked from the air numbers. There is plenty of statistical data on actual operating systems, most for long periods of operation. You are “proving” the bumble bee can’t fly. The bumble bee has more sense than to pay any attention to your “facts”.

The same with your environmental fudge. Steel wheels on steel rails use 2% of the energy of rubber tyres on bitumen. Fact. A fact well known for almost 2 hundred years, along with most of what you painstakingly calculate using dubious assumptions can all be culled from countless real life examples.

You seem to simultaneously demand that we know everything about the proposed Light Rail down to the last rivet, and yet object to the negotiations having got as far as they have. Which is it?

4 wheels good, 2 bogies bad?

Every journey begins with the first step. Waiting for the “better” roller skates is just waiting for ever. Particularly where that “better” roller skates is just an update of that roaring success: mini-cabs which took the world by storm in the ’70s. Are people going to pay the cost of a taxi fare to share a small vehicle with a bunch of (hopefully) sober strangers?

I dodn’t see your costing on all the autonomous vehicles and freeways, vehicles which will have to be built to higher standard than private cars, at greater expense, far greater than even the Light Rail. Who will finance the vehicles? Or how on earth you are going to get people to share rides, particularly women or children getting into a vehicle with no driver, but probably a strange man or two.

Will the autonomous vehicles eliminate private non-autonomous vehicles and how will they interact with them? Autonomous vehicles may avoid collisions but human drivers won’t with them. Will buses be eliminated, or will this just be another cost on top of the private cars and buses? So many obvious questions just off the top of my head.

rubaiyat said :

Autonomous cars solve nothing except the “Need” to take your hands off the wheel, ignoring all the other drivers who have the much cheaper non-Autonomous that will stuff up all your good intentions. They are just dressed up car pooling, for people who don’t want, and still won’t car pool. The same, if not more, enormously expensive cars will clutter up the same enormously expensive, inefficient, divisive, noisy, dangerous and polluting freeways. Claimed improvements are the cars will park themselves somewhere more convenient (in front of your house in your suburb?) and drive themselves independently to pick you up and do all the extra pick-ups for all the other supposed sharers of the car. How that doesn’t mean more cars on the road, a substantial number empty, has me totally puzzled.

The 4.8 persons per car was in the fudged “data” of (your) included report:

http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/faq.html#cmContract

Variously concocted as “(SHARED FLEET 4 people/car 48 people)” and elsewhere calculated out as 4.8 persons per car.

The “4 people per car” was used to compare a full bus with full cars in the context of that famous Munster visual misrepresentation. Nowhere does the simulation “concoct” or “calculate out” 4.8 people per car. If it does, I have made a terrible mistake I would really like to apologise for and correct, so please help me with an exact reference.

When you say ” Autonomous cars are to transport problems what Clean Coal is to global warming, electronic cigarettes to smoking addiction, fracking to the demise of fossil fuel addiction. A brazen distraction for the simple minded.” are you saying that an autonmous fleet of electric vehicles is a technological improbability, or that even if they did exist, they would not be capable of providing a clean, efficient, equitable and universal transport service?

When you say “This is ACTION’s statement on buses to the city, ‘The route 200 combines with routes 251, 252, 255 and 259 to provide a bus EVERY FIVE MINUTES from Gungahlin to the City, Russell and Barton: http://www.action.act.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0010/728758/Gungahlin-Campaign-Online-Graphic-image.jpg“, I wonder, did you actually count the services from Gungahlin to Civic on weekday mornings, 6:30 to 09:00? They are easy to find:

http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/57_city – 8 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/56_city – 8 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/58_city# – 9 services
http://www.action.act.gov.au/routes-network-14-improvements/200_fyshwick – 44 services

That’s 69 services in 150 minutes – more frequent than one every 2min 20 sec.

You didnt reassert the light rail freq at 5 minutes – so you accept 6 minutes?

When you say “There has been no final decision on the Light Rail trams, but it is reasonable to assume that they will be off the shelf purchases of commercially available models. The Flexity 2 is a typical model, most have greater capacity.” I guess you are saying the CM Development Application, and the statements from the CM Director of Procurement on capacity are inaccurate or pessimistic?

When you say “Rather than dragging around 2 tonnes of useless, dangerous metal and then having to dispose of it for 98% of the day, just to get around, it seems bleedin’ obvious that you just take YOURSELF, the only thing that needs to move, to the common conveyance that circulates for everybody.. “, I guess you are not thinking of the needs of those that struggle to take themselves to/from the common conveyance, those that need to travel to/from places and at times not served by the common conveyance, perhaps because they are not like you? Do you not recognise yourself in this list, if not now, when you were young, or when you are 75? http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/index.html#motivation

When you say “But you make so many wonderful points. I look forward to the elimination of lifts and escalators to be replaced by 100s of thousands of autonomous ladders all fighting for space in our buildings and then getting tossed in piles in corners, stinking up the place and making it impossible to hear yourself think.”, I again detect sarcasm, and an attempt to deflect the discussion away from rational and evidence-based argument, and I’m wondering what the real problem is that you want to talk about, because it doesnt seem to be transport for Canberra.

justin heywood said :

Instead we get a $billion dollar thought bubble.

There you go spoiling it all again.

Just stick to the $768 million which includes a $178 million contingency.

btw How is the $300 million dollar Majura Parkway working out? Solved the traffic jams past the Airport and up Majura Road?

justin heywood said :

KentFitch said :

….In one respect, it doesn’t matter: commercial forces will do what they always do, and within 5-10 years, the light-rail carpet-baggers will be replaced by the autonomous car fleet carpet-baggers…and the cost of the tram will become another burden lumped onto the hapless ACTION and the people responsible will be watching the sea-level rise from their retirement villas.

Excellent post that.

Even the the most ardent ‘content marketing’ spinners mostly agree that the tram route is questionable, and the actual route is surely the most important aspect of any transport system. The best they can say is ‘well at least we’re doing something’!

Imagine what COULD be done with that kind of money.
Instead we get a $billion dollar thought bubble.

So don’t argue against Light Rail, argue against the route and I will join you.

justin heywood10:03 am 30 Nov 15

KentFitch said :

….In one respect, it doesn’t matter: commercial forces will do what they always do, and within 5-10 years, the light-rail carpet-baggers will be replaced by the autonomous car fleet carpet-baggers…and the cost of the tram will become another burden lumped onto the hapless ACTION and the people responsible will be watching the sea-level rise from their retirement villas.

Excellent post that.

Even the the most ardent ‘content marketing’ spinners mostly agree that the tram route is questionable, and the actual route is surely the most important aspect of any transport system. The best they can say is ‘well at least we’re doing something’!

Imagine what COULD be done with that kind of money.
Instead we get a $billion dollar thought bubble.

KentFitch said :

rubaiyat said :

KentFitch said :

Currently ACTION provides capacity for 2860 seats, 4473 seat+standing and 120 bikes in AM commuter period (6:30-09:00) from Gungahlin to Civic. Capital Metro say in 2020 they’ll provide 1495 seats, 4508 seat+standing, 92 bikes in the same period. And by then the population will have grown, and whereas ACTION now have a capacity of 74.1 passengers per 1000 Gungahlin residents, the tram capacity will be just 61.8. Seated capacity will have dropped from 47.4 seats per 1000 residents to 20.5. And this is a better transport service?

Just on the face of it those figures seem wrong, because the proposed peak hour frequency of the buses and trams are the same, every 5 minutes, and the tram has double the capacity of the largest bendy bus which has 65 seated + 42 standing, total 107 passengers.

We don’t know what model Tram will be used yet, but typically a Bombardier Flexity 2 tram has 74 seated + 148 standing total 222 passengers. So more seats and definitely twice as many passengers. There are higher capacity trams.

They may seem wrong to you, particularly given the spin and early expectations promoted by the Government and Capital Metro (CM), but they are correct . Don’t take my word for it, examine the CM EIS and development applications and break out a calculator! The former CM procurement manager said seating capacity would be “about 25% of total” and each tram would be licensed for about 200 passengers in total. In the internal vehicle layout submitted by CM in their development application, there are 48 “permanent” seats and 12 folding seats. If half the folding seats are down and in use and half are kept up, 54 people can be seated, 4 bikes can be carried and about 140 people carried standing – that’s the max. I (optimistically for the tram case) modeled 65 seated and 131 standing (total of 196) plus 4 bikes – but this higher number of seated is very unlikely, and if it happens, standing capacity would be further reduced (it would be under 196).

There are 63 ACTION bus services from Gungahlin to Civic between 6:30am and 9am – about one every 2min20sec. On average, each has 45.4 seats and 25.5 standing places.
CM plan to run 22 or 23 in the same period – I assumed 23.

Trams are planned to run at 6 minute intervals 7am-9am (not 5 minute intervals as you remembered – CM silently backed off that commitment), 15 minute intervals before 7am.

Increasing seated passenger capacity out of Gungahlin in the morning would requiring configuring trams to have a much lower total capacity and/or running many more trams. Due to signal priority modeled for the trams, more frequent services create even more intersection congestion, and travel times start to rise very steeply particularly at the high-volume cross-intersections along Northbourne. Services can’t be made more frequent than 3 minutes without completely upgrading the electrical (power supply infrastructure) capabilities specified in the tender.

When you say “The same alarm bells ring when you look at simple figures such as above and fudged data…” were you hoping to dismiss my data as not just “inconvenient truth” but also wrong, because you had thought trams would run more frequently and carry more people, and had thought buses didnt run as frequently? Do you now think my data with regards buses and CM is correct?

When you say “… such as claims for shared autonomous cars ‘Just around the corner'”, are you saying that that a claim that shared fleets of autonomous cars will be commercialised between 2020 and 2025 is like saying they are “just around the corner”? Are you informed on the billions of dollars being invested by competing auto-manufacturers and their suppliers, academics, governments and IT companies and the rapid progress they are making?

When you say “.. with 4.8 passengers per vehicle. Really? “, I think you are referencing some material with which I am not familiar. Can you supply a citation for the “4.8 passengers per vehicle” please?

When you say “We only get an average of 1.1 passengers now and autonomous cars are proposed to run around empty to pick up passengers or to remote park, yet somehow they are at near full capacity on average?”, again, I am not aware of any simulations of shared fleets of autonomous vehicles, at least in tidal commuter flows such as Canberra, which show anything near “near full on average”. The Canberra simulation shows for high usage, around 1.5 – 1.7 average people per car in peak AM, but this increases to around 2 for popular AM destinations (Civic, Parkes, ..).

When you say “Trams are clean, quiet and do not use up much space which is why they can be run in inner city residential areas and down green centre strips unobtrusively. No way buses and cars can do that. Particularly cars. Trams are particularly suitable for mixed pedestrian areas in Town Centres like the Bourke Street Mall.” I think you also express my feelings about trams in Melbourne, and on the Gold Coast, and between Circular Quay and UNSW. Like Matthew Burke, we both like trams! I guess I’m not sure that I like them well enough to want to turn Gungahlin-Civic into those places, and I don’t see how they can solve the much wider and pressing mobility problems in Canberra.

When you say “There are plenty of sources for the known capacity of dedicated bus lanes vs rail transit, I have sited them numerous times. Buses simply can not match Light Rail, unless you build very expensive multi-lane busways with completely divided rights of way and overhead passes. All of which are clumsy, polluting, extremely noisy and unpleasant”, I think, well, heavy rail has higher still capacity, but that is irrelevant because the required capacity from Gungahlin to Civic is actually very low and no problem at all for dedicated bus lanes.

When you say “How are we doing with those other ‘just around the corner’ options such as hover cars and ‘Clean Coal’?” I detect sarcasm and attempted deflection of argument, and echoing of what many did say in 1980 about PCs, in 1994 about the internet, in 2007 about smart-phones, in 2010 about tablets and 2015 about smart-watches, and what many say still about climate-change, and no-doubt 5500 years ago said about the wheel.

If you do not think autonomous vehicles will come to pass, you should provide an argument to explain your case.

And you should come up with a concrete, implementable, alternative urban and transport plan which will improve mobility for those who need it most, people like us, people like my friends and family, people like these: http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/index.html#motivation which will also reduce the urban scourge of the car, reduce pollution, reduce social disadvantage and reduce spending on transport.

If the tram had any hope of doing any of these things in Canberra, I’d be “all in”. However, I do not find it possible to believe it will do anything but make things worse. With the half-hearted fig-leaf of the tram project, the ACT Government continues the sprawl into West Belconnen, over the border into NSW, into Molonglo, places it knows the tram will never make it to, and if it did, would result in slow commutes. Development continues unabated at Brindabella Park, urban infill (and higher densities) at random places all over the city without regard to sustainable transport. Just a tram-shaped fig-leaf.

In one respect, it doesn’t matter: commercial forces will do what they always do, and within 5-10 years, the light-rail carpet-baggers will be replaced by the autonomous car fleet carpet-baggers – Uber, Tesla, Ford, Benz, Nissan are likely players, and the cost of the tram will become another burden lumped onto the hapless ACTION and the people responsible will be watching the sea-level rise from their retirement villas.

I was a party to most of the innovations you mention so think I can pick a winner and smell a dead rat when I see one. I even argued beyond the rise of PCs to the inevitable use of the GUI for PC users stuck on CLIs. Laughably the last stand out I know, my brother-in-law, just bought the Mac he “would never buy” after almost 30 years.

Autonomous cars solve nothing except the “Need” to take your hands off the wheel, ignoring all the other drivers who have the much cheaper non-Autonomous that will stuff up all your good intentions. They are just dressed up car pooling, for people who don’t want, and still won’t car pool. The same, if not more, enormously expensive cars will clutter up the same enormously expensive, inefficient, divisive, noisy, dangerous and polluting freeways. Claimed improvements are the cars will park themselves somewhere more convenient (in front of your house in your suburb?) and drive themselves independently to pick you up and do all the extra pick-ups for all the other supposed sharers of the car. How that doesn’t mean more cars on the road, a substantial number empty, has me totally puzzled.

The 4.8 persons per car was in the fudged “data” of (your) included report:

http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/faq.html#cmContract

Variously concocted as “(SHARED FLEET 4 people/car 48 people)” and elsewhere calculated out as 4.8 persons per car.

The same report that ignored the real number of cars to move the same number of bus passengers and that those cars would not be neatly parked next to each other but sprawled out across multiple ugly lanes of a wide impassible freeways all jostling for position at speed.

The same report that showed telescoped photos of “ugly” light rail but did not show telescoped “lovely” roads.

Autonomous cars are to transport problems what Clean Coal is to global warming, electronic cigarettes to smoking addiction, fracking to the demise of fossil fuel addiction.

A brazen distraction for the simple minded.

This is ACTION’s statement on buses to the city, “The route 200 combines with routes 251, 252, 255 and 259 to provide a bus EVERY FIVE MINUTES from Gungahlin to the City, Russell and Barton”:

http://www.action.act.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0010/728758/Gungahlin-Campaign-Online-Graphic-image.jpg

There has been no final decision on the Light Rail trams, but it is reasonable to assume that they will be off the shelf purchases of commercially available models. The Flexity 2 is a typical model, most have greater capacity.

Rather than dragging around 2 tonnes of useless, dangerous metal and then having to dispose of it for 98% of the day, just to get around, it seems bleedin’ obvious that you just take YOURSELF, the only thing that needs to move, to the common conveyance that circulates for everybody and does so in 2 narrow, quiet lanes that have vastly more capacity than buses and enormously more capacity than freeways, whilst using 2% of the energy for transport.

But you make so many wonderful points. I look forward to the elimination of lifts and escalators to be replaced by 100s of thousands of autonomous ladders all fighting for space in our buildings and then getting tossed in piles in corners, stinking up the place and making it impossible to hear yourself think.

The desolation of the six lanes of Northbourne Ave, and the acres of nasty car parking in Civic show just what cars do to where we live, work and play.

Cars KILL Cities. Not just people.

The ABC story on Capital Metro showed the difference that just a bit over a year of Light Rail in the Gold Coast (the line isn’t even complete) has made to everywhere it passes.

dungfungus said :

JC said :

dungfungus said :

Meanwhile the world’s warmists are “clean-jetting” into Paris for another talk-fest about a non-problem.
Does Paris have trams? No, I didn’t think so.

You would think wrong in that case. Paris has 8 active trams lines. They have been quite active in building them over the past 15 years or so.

The tram lines are for the most part outside the walls of the inner city and provide cross city links, or act lighter ‘extensions’ to Metro lines.

Ahh, the forensic JC again confirming there are no trams in Paris, as I said.

…and now you are Tram denier.

Yet there they are!

JC said :

dungfungus said :

Meanwhile the world’s warmists are “clean-jetting” into Paris for another talk-fest about a non-problem.
Does Paris have trams? No, I didn’t think so.

You would think wrong in that case. Paris has 8 active trams lines. They have been quite active in building them over the past 15 years or so.

The tram lines are for the most part outside the walls of the inner city and provide cross city links, or act lighter ‘extensions’ to Metro lines.

Ahh, the forensic JC again confirming there are no trams in Paris, as I said.

rommeldog56 said :

rubaiyat said :

rommeldog56 said :

However, in my view, the decision making of the Barr Labor Gov’t really is much worse than previous ACT Gov’t – including Liberal.

Two things I haven’t forgotten and never will, but you seem to have:

1. Katie Bender, whose memorial plaque is still in the lawn facing the lake.

2. Kate Carnell couldn’t find ANY of the files on the Bruce Stadium fiasco, after the original $12.3 million cost to the government blew out to $82 million, almost SEVEN TIMES* the original cost! and turned into the most useless white elephant ever.

But I imagine when Jeremy Hansen keeps his promise to both tear up the contract and the tracks for the Light Rail “No matter the cost” you will be applauding the loudest because that is such a promise of even more “good decision making” to come.

And it seems according to you that yet more bad Labor decision making was that they didn’t evict everyone and tear up Gungahlin.

* Working on your constant broken record of exaggeration, we’ll call that ELEVEN TIMES cost overrun.

I fully agree with your (1) and (2). Terrible Gov’t decisions – I and many others certainly have not forgotten. A related tragedy is that Kate Carnell is now a highly paid lobbyist – so even the private sector does not learn about the poor administration/decision making of politicians.

As for the rest of your claims, once again extreme extrapolations that end the end, do your arguments no good.

No extrapolation, just quoting Mr Decision Maker himself, Jeremy Hansen, from the ABC Light Rail interview.

…and the Trillion dollar Light Rail that is going to cost a Gadzillion dollars before finally costing more than the entire Australian GDP for the next 35 years?

Come on, don’t be shy if you are going to repeatedly lie don’t hold back, go for the maximum laughs.

rubaiyat said :

KentFitch said :

Currently ACTION provides capacity for 2860 seats, 4473 seat+standing and 120 bikes in AM commuter period (6:30-09:00) from Gungahlin to Civic. Capital Metro say in 2020 they’ll provide 1495 seats, 4508 seat+standing, 92 bikes in the same period. And by then the population will have grown, and whereas ACTION now have a capacity of 74.1 passengers per 1000 Gungahlin residents, the tram capacity will be just 61.8. Seated capacity will have dropped from 47.4 seats per 1000 residents to 20.5. And this is a better transport service?

Just on the face of it those figures seem wrong, because the proposed peak hour frequency of the buses and trams are the same, every 5 minutes, and the tram has double the capacity of the largest bendy bus which has 65 seated + 42 standing, total 107 passengers.

We don’t know what model Tram will be used yet, but typically a Bombardier Flexity 2 tram has 74 seated + 148 standing total 222 passengers. So more seats and definitely twice as many passengers. There are higher capacity trams.

They may seem wrong to you, particularly given the spin and early expectations promoted by the Government and Capital Metro (CM), but they are correct . Don’t take my word for it, examine the CM EIS and development applications and break out a calculator! The former CM procurement manager said seating capacity would be “about 25% of total” and each tram would be licensed for about 200 passengers in total. In the internal vehicle layout submitted by CM in their development application, there are 48 “permanent” seats and 12 folding seats. If half the folding seats are down and in use and half are kept up, 54 people can be seated, 4 bikes can be carried and about 140 people carried standing – that’s the max. I (optimistically for the tram case) modeled 65 seated and 131 standing (total of 196) plus 4 bikes – but this higher number of seated is very unlikely, and if it happens, standing capacity would be further reduced (it would be under 196).

There are 63 ACTION bus services from Gungahlin to Civic between 6:30am and 9am – about one every 2min20sec. On average, each has 45.4 seats and 25.5 standing places.
CM plan to run 22 or 23 in the same period – I assumed 23.

Trams are planned to run at 6 minute intervals 7am-9am (not 5 minute intervals as you remembered – CM silently backed off that commitment), 15 minute intervals before 7am.

Increasing seated passenger capacity out of Gungahlin in the morning would requiring configuring trams to have a much lower total capacity and/or running many more trams. Due to signal priority modeled for the trams, more frequent services create even more intersection congestion, and travel times start to rise very steeply particularly at the high-volume cross-intersections along Northbourne. Services can’t be made more frequent than 3 minutes without completely upgrading the electrical (power supply infrastructure) capabilities specified in the tender.

When you say “The same alarm bells ring when you look at simple figures such as above and fudged data…” were you hoping to dismiss my data as not just “inconvenient truth” but also wrong, because you had thought trams would run more frequently and carry more people, and had thought buses didnt run as frequently? Do you now think my data with regards buses and CM is correct?

When you say “… such as claims for shared autonomous cars ‘Just around the corner'”, are you saying that that a claim that shared fleets of autonomous cars will be commercialised between 2020 and 2025 is like saying they are “just around the corner”? Are you informed on the billions of dollars being invested by competing auto-manufacturers and their suppliers, academics, governments and IT companies and the rapid progress they are making?

When you say “.. with 4.8 passengers per vehicle. Really? “, I think you are referencing some material with which I am not familiar. Can you supply a citation for the “4.8 passengers per vehicle” please?

When you say “We only get an average of 1.1 passengers now and autonomous cars are proposed to run around empty to pick up passengers or to remote park, yet somehow they are at near full capacity on average?”, again, I am not aware of any simulations of shared fleets of autonomous vehicles, at least in tidal commuter flows such as Canberra, which show anything near “near full on average”. The Canberra simulation shows for high usage, around 1.5 – 1.7 average people per car in peak AM, but this increases to around 2 for popular AM destinations (Civic, Parkes, ..).

When you say “Trams are clean, quiet and do not use up much space which is why they can be run in inner city residential areas and down green centre strips unobtrusively. No way buses and cars can do that. Particularly cars. Trams are particularly suitable for mixed pedestrian areas in Town Centres like the Bourke Street Mall.” I think you also express my feelings about trams in Melbourne, and on the Gold Coast, and between Circular Quay and UNSW. Like Matthew Burke, we both like trams! I guess I’m not sure that I like them well enough to want to turn Gungahlin-Civic into those places, and I don’t see how they can solve the much wider and pressing mobility problems in Canberra.

When you say “There are plenty of sources for the known capacity of dedicated bus lanes vs rail transit, I have sited them numerous times. Buses simply can not match Light Rail, unless you build very expensive multi-lane busways with completely divided rights of way and overhead passes. All of which are clumsy, polluting, extremely noisy and unpleasant”, I think, well, heavy rail has higher still capacity, but that is irrelevant because the required capacity from Gungahlin to Civic is actually very low and no problem at all for dedicated bus lanes.

When you say “How are we doing with those other ‘just around the corner’ options such as hover cars and ‘Clean Coal’?” I detect sarcasm and attempted deflection of argument, and echoing of what many did say in 1980 about PCs, in 1994 about the internet, in 2007 about smart-phones, in 2010 about tablets and 2015 about smart-watches, and what many say still about climate-change, and no-doubt 5500 years ago said about the wheel.

If you do not think autonomous vehicles will come to pass, you should provide an argument to explain your case.

And you should come up with a concrete, implementable, alternative urban and transport plan which will improve mobility for those who need it most, people like us, people like my friends and family, people like these: http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/index.html#motivation which will also reduce the urban scourge of the car, reduce pollution, reduce social disadvantage and reduce spending on transport.

If the tram had any hope of doing any of these things in Canberra, I’d be “all in”. However, I do not find it possible to believe it will do anything but make things worse. With the half-hearted fig-leaf of the tram project, the ACT Government continues the sprawl into West Belconnen, over the border into NSW, into Molonglo, places it knows the tram will never make it to, and if it did, would result in slow commutes. Development continues unabated at Brindabella Park, urban infill (and higher densities) at random places all over the city without regard to sustainable transport. Just a tram-shaped fig-leaf.

In one respect, it doesn’t matter: commercial forces will do what they always do, and within 5-10 years, the light-rail carpet-baggers will be replaced by the autonomous car fleet carpet-baggers – Uber, Tesla, Ford, Benz, Nissan are likely players, and the cost of the tram will become another burden lumped onto the hapless ACTION and the people responsible will be watching the sea-level rise from their retirement villas.

rubaiyat said :

rommeldog56 said :

However, in my view, the decision making of the Barr Labor Gov’t really is much worse than previous ACT Gov’t – including Liberal.

Two things I haven’t forgotten and never will, but you seem to have:

1. Katie Bender, whose memorial plaque is still in the lawn facing the lake.

2. Kate Carnell couldn’t find ANY of the files on the Bruce Stadium fiasco, after the original $12.3 million cost to the government blew out to $82 million, almost SEVEN TIMES* the original cost! and turned into the most useless white elephant ever.

But I imagine when Jeremy Hansen keeps his promise to both tear up the contract and the tracks for the Light Rail “No matter the cost” you will be applauding the loudest because that is such a promise of even more “good decision making” to come.

And it seems according to you that yet more bad Labor decision making was that they didn’t evict everyone and tear up Gungahlin.

* Working on your constant broken record of exaggeration, we’ll call that ELEVEN TIMES cost overrun.

I fully agree with your (1) and (2). Terrible Gov’t decisions – I and many others certainly have not forgotten. A related tragedy is that Kate Carnell is now a highly paid lobbyist – so even the private sector does not learn about the poor administration/decision making of politicians.

As for the rest of your claims, once again extreme extrapolations that end the end, do your arguments no good.

rommeldog56 said :

However, in my view, the decision making of the Barr Labor Gov’t really is much worse than previous ACT Gov’t – including Liberal.

Two things I haven’t forgotten and never will, but you seem to have:

1. Katie Bender, whose memorial plaque is still in the lawn facing the lake.

2. Kate Carnell couldn’t find ANY of the files on the Bruce Stadium fiasco, after the original $12.3 million cost to the government blew out to $82 million, almost SEVEN TIMES* the original cost! and turned into the most useless white elephant ever.

But I imagine when Jeremy Hansen keeps his promise to both tear up the contract and the tracks for the Light Rail “No matter the cost” you will be applauding the loudest because that is such a promise of even more “good decision making” to come.

And it seems according to you that yet more bad Labor decision making was that they didn’t evict everyone and tear up Gungahlin.

* Working on your constant broken record of exaggeration, we’ll call that ELEVEN TIMES cost overrun.

rommeldog56 said :

rubaiyat said :

The Velez-Malaga Light Rail, which failed because it never ran into the cities, was given as a warning against inappropriate transport design, but oddly SEVEN bankrupted Spanish freeways didn’t seem worth mentioning.

If there were 7 Spanish freeways that went bankrupt, then those must have been privately funded or Public Private Partnerships (like Canberra’s tram will be). That bankruptcy wouldn’t have been due to the GFC would it ?

Will bankruptcy affect Canberra’s tram ? I would think not – the ACT Government – in it’s infinite wisdom – has underwritten passenger numbers – so it’s a guaranteed money maker for the tram consortia and their shareholders. Unfortunately, at the cost to ACT ratepayers though.

Ironically, the biggest renewable energy company in Spain is about to bite the dust as well.

dungfungus said :

Does Paris have trams? No, I didn’t think so.

I thought Paris still did have a tramline hidden away somewhere. Anyway, it has a wonderful, integrated urban transport system that far exceeds anything we’ll ever see in Canberra. It also has a population and population density that far exceed Canberra’s, too.

dungfungus said :

Meanwhile the world’s warmists are “clean-jetting” into Paris for another talk-fest about a non-problem.
Does Paris have trams? No, I didn’t think so.

You would think wrong in that case. Paris has 8 active trams lines. They have been quite active in building them over the past 15 years or so.

The tram lines are for the most part outside the walls of the inner city and provide cross city links, or act lighter ‘extensions’ to Metro lines.

rubaiyat said :

The Velez-Malaga Light Rail, which failed because it never ran into the cities, was given as a warning against inappropriate transport design, but oddly SEVEN bankrupted Spanish freeways didn’t seem worth mentioning.

If there were 7 Spanish freeways that went bankrupt, then those must have been privately funded or Public Private Partnerships (like Canberra’s tram will be). That bankruptcy wouldn’t have been due to the GFC would it ? Will bankruptcy affect Canberra’s tram ? I would think not – the ACT Government – in it’s infinite wisdom – has underwritten passenger numbers – so it’s a guaranteed money maker for the tram consortia and their shareholders. Unfortunately, at the cost to ACT ratepayers though.

rubaiyat said :

How exactly is “The poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting of this ACT Labor/Greens Government” any different from “the poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting” of the previous Liberal government, that created the problem by building Gungahlin in the first place without a transport plan? But now we have it and it is the fastest growing area in Canberra what ARE we going to do about the transport in and out of Gungahlin ?

How is it different – its not. However, in my view, the decision making of the Barr Labor Gov’t really is much worse than previous ACT Gov’t – including Liberal. Labor has been in power here for a much, much longer period of time too. The previous Liberal ACT Govt was a long time ago now, I dunno who approved the plan for Gunners and the transport links – but there have been successive ACT Governments – mostly Labor – who haven’t fixed it.

What I don’t understand is why those (mostly Labor) successive Governments keep on releasing land in Gunners – thereby adding to and exasperating those already well known transport link problems in/out of Gunners. .

rubaiyat said :

rommeldog56 said :

rubaiyat said :

Someone asked what Malcolm Turnbull has done that is any different:

“Mr Turnbull arrived by tram with Mayor Tom Tate before facing a large media pack, where he said it was hard to imagine a better project to commence his commitment to funding public infrastructure based on MERIT instead of IDEOLOGY.”

Take 2 :

Yeah – “MERIT”. That’s why the Fed’s tipped in about m$400+ into the Gold Coast Tram and nothing into the ACTs Tram. Because the ACTs Benefits Cost Ratio (BCR) was m$1:1.2 so from a “MERIT” perspective, the Gold Coast Tram, with it’s much higher BCR, got the Feds $. That’s why the PM rode it – to support Federal funding of it.

On the other hand, with the weak BCR of 1:1.2, the ACT Gov’t funding submission was deemed not worthy of Federal $ because there wasn’t enough “MERIT” in it compared to the other, & so it became a Public Private Partnership – fully funded by ACT Ratepayers/residents without any Federal funding injection.

Makes sense in context of the poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting of this ACT Labor/Greens Government, caused by the apathy of ACT voters to accept such decisions.

I can not see the PM riding the Gunners-Civic ACT Tram.

The PM rode the NOW obviously successful GCLR Tram that Labor funded and the Liberals said would be a disaster, so anything is possible if there is a photo opp in it.

Odd that the GCLR had NO MERIT only a while ago! Now it does. How did that miracle occur? In fact the GCLR according to the Liberals prior to it getting built was going to be a White Elephant with EXACTLY THE SAME constant and wild exaggeration of its costs and hysterical predictions of doom as they are using in Canberra.

Don’t tell me that all the reports and submissions that flow back and forth mean nothing, when it all comes down to simple political prejudices?

How exactly is “The poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting of this ACT Labor/Greens Government” any different from “the poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting” of the previous Liberal government, that created the problem by building Gungahlin in the first place without a transport plan?

But now we have it and it is the fastest growing area in Canberra what ARE we going to do about the transport in and out of Gungahlin?

It’s all about to tank – that will solve all Canberra’s problems.

rubaiyat said :

KentFitch said :

Currently ACTION provides capacity for 2860 seats, 4473 seat+standing and 120 bikes in AM commuter period (6:30-09:00) from Gungahlin to Civic. Capital Metro say in 2020 they’ll provide 1495 seats, 4508 seat+standing, 92 bikes in the same period. And by then the population will have grown, and whereas ACTION now have a capacity of 74.1 passengers per 1000 Gungahlin residents, the tram capacity will be just 61.8. Seated capacity will have dropped from 47.4 seats per 1000 residents to 20.5. And this is a better transport service?

Just on the face of it those figures seem wrong, because the proposed peak hour frequency of the buses and trams are the same, every 5 minutes, and the tram has double the capacity of the largest bendy bus which has 65 seated + 42 standing, total 107 passengers.

We don’t know what model Tram will be used yet, but typically a Bombardier Flexity 2 tram has 74 seated + 148 standing total 222 passengers. So more seats and definitely twice as many passengers. There are higher capacity trams.

The link goes to a very dense website, some of which I have seen before. The same alarm bells ring when you look at simple figures such as above and fudged data such as claims for shared autonomous cars “Just around the corner” with 4.8 passengers per vehicle. Really? We only get an average of 1.1 passengers now and autonomous cars are proposed to run around empty to pick up passengers or to remote park, yet somehow they are at near full capacity on average?

By contrast peak hour trams in Melbourne actually run at up to 112% of capacity. In real life, in this universe and this dimension, not some virtual GIGO analysis.

Trams are clean, quiet and do not use up much space which is why they can be run in inner city residential areas and down green centre strips unobtrusively. No way buses and cars can do that. Particularly cars. Trams are particularly suitable for mixed pedestrian areas in Town Centres like the Bourke Street Mall.

There are plenty of sources for the known capacity of dedicated bus lanes vs rail transit, I have sited them numerous times. Buses simply can not match Light Rail, unless you build very expensive multi-lane busways with completely divided rights of way and overhead passes. All of which are clumsy, polluting, extremely noisy and unpleasant.

How are we doing with those other “just around the corner” options such as hover cars and “Clean Coal”?

Meanwhile Canberra just keeps getting hotter and the roads keep getting more congested.

Meanwhile the world’s warmists are “clean-jetting” into Paris for another talk-fest about a non-problem.
Does Paris have trams? No, I didn’t think so.
Damn, all the delegates will have to be conveyed by evil chauffeur driven cars.

rubaiyat said :

Odd that the GCLR had NO MERIT only a while ago! Now it does. How did that miracle occur? In fact the GCLR according to the Liberals prior to it getting built was going to be a White Elephant with EXACTLY THE SAME constant and wild exaggeration of its costs and hysterical predictions of doom as they are using in Canberra.

It was the Federal Government that basically deemed that the Gold Cost tram had merit and that Canberra’s was not worthy of contribution.

“Wild exaggeration of costs” ? Well, as i recall, the costs of the Gold Coast tram did actually blow out substantially – no doubt the injection of funds from the Fed’s helped soften that blow.

rommeldog56 said :

Nilrem said :

rommeldog56 said :

From the OP : “One conversation we need to have more is about the function of the Capital Metro tram as more than just a commuter solution.”

But a commuter solution to try to fix some of the poor planning by successive ACT Gov’t in Gunners, is just what it is. Trying to backwards reengineer that or spin it to be anything else is, is just disingenuous and insulting. After the Tram leaves Dickson and before it reaches Civic, there are 3 stops.

Apart from the fact that its missing Braddon completely, I can not envisage 3 stops reinvigorating Northborne Avenue to any great extent – especially if passengers have to walk to a Tram stop on Northborne Ave at night in the dead of a Canberra winter.

The Planned Eloura Street stop is only two (narrow) blocks from Lonsdale Street.

The tram stop is in the middle of Northborne Ave, which u have to cross in order to progress across those two blocks to into Lonsdale street.

So, it does miss Braddon completely.

I actually agree with this one and have all along.

Having a tram line down the middle of at times 8 lanes of traffic, is not an antidote to the 8 lanes of traffic, it only stops the 8 lanes turning into 12.

I still would like to see a loop Tram running through the very heart of the City in Bunda Street, up Lonsdale to Dickson, possibly round Watson over to Exhibition Park, back down the other side through Lyneham, Turner and the ANU to cross the Lake, through the Parliamentary triangle, Barton, Manuka, Kingston, back over the Lake through Russell and back to the City along Constitution Ave.

Thus going past the String of Pearls of current and future medium to high density residential, tourist attractions, offices, education facilities, sporting facilities and shopping, eating and entertainment.

tooltime said :

Do you agree that mixed-use developments make Canberra more liveable and sustainable?

Only if its done correctly.

Kingston Foreshore – good
Lonsdale Street – good
Belco Town Centre – no good. The whole area there between Lake Ginninderra College and the Water Police part has been an eyesore for the 25yrs I’ve been here.
Tuggers – See above
Between McKeller and Charnwood (North of Ginninderra Drive) – Another shocker. There’s a bit of life at Charny now, but where are the social, recreational and leisure services really?

They’re no better elsewhere unfortunately…

Googong – No…

Most of those are attempts at putting lipstick on a pig.

The ones that are successful are fairly obvious. They are well designed and central.

With the surrounding higher density residential that makes them work.

Incompetent design is incompetent design. It’s easy to spot in anything. It is the T-Shirt with the stupid clipart graphics, the dress with the fat bow on it, the car with the airfoil stuck on the bum, the junk food with the flag stuck in the burger, it is the desolate windswept faceless high rise surrounded by car parking, heavy traffic and a smear of planter boxes and granite paving facing south out of the sun and into the winter winds…

rommeldog56 said :

rubaiyat said :

Someone asked what Malcolm Turnbull has done that is any different:

“Mr Turnbull arrived by tram with Mayor Tom Tate before facing a large media pack, where he said it was hard to imagine a better project to commence his commitment to funding public infrastructure based on MERIT instead of IDEOLOGY.”

Take 2 :

Yeah – “MERIT”. That’s why the Fed’s tipped in about m$400+ into the Gold Coast Tram and nothing into the ACTs Tram. Because the ACTs Benefits Cost Ratio (BCR) was m$1:1.2 so from a “MERIT” perspective, the Gold Coast Tram, with it’s much higher BCR, got the Feds $. That’s why the PM rode it – to support Federal funding of it.

On the other hand, with the weak BCR of 1:1.2, the ACT Gov’t funding submission was deemed not worthy of Federal $ because there wasn’t enough “MERIT” in it compared to the other, & so it became a Public Private Partnership – fully funded by ACT Ratepayers/residents without any Federal funding injection.

Makes sense in context of the poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting of this ACT Labor/Greens Government, caused by the apathy of ACT voters to accept such decisions.

I can not see the PM riding the Gunners-Civic ACT Tram.

The PM rode the NOW obviously successful GCLR Tram that Labor funded and the Liberals said would be a disaster, so anything is possible if there is a photo opp in it.

Odd that the GCLR had NO MERIT only a while ago! Now it does. How did that miracle occur? In fact the GCLR according to the Liberals prior to it getting built was going to be a White Elephant with EXACTLY THE SAME constant and wild exaggeration of its costs and hysterical predictions of doom as they are using in Canberra.

Don’t tell me that all the reports and submissions that flow back and forth mean nothing, when it all comes down to simple political prejudices?

How exactly is “The poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting of this ACT Labor/Greens Government” any different from “the poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting” of the previous Liberal government, that created the problem by building Gungahlin in the first place without a transport plan?

But now we have it and it is the fastest growing area in Canberra what ARE we going to do about the transport in and out of Gungahlin?

For those of you who missed it or would rather poke both eyes out with hot coals than turn on the ABC:

https://vimeo.com/abccanberra

The 2015 RACE FROM CRACE scorecard was:

Bike 20min

Car 29 min

Bus plus Light Rail 40 min

Bus 47 min

The clear answer if you want to get to work fast whilst not bankrupting the ACT, and staying fit in a clean, healthy, quiet city, with the prospect of being able to do all that for a long time to come: Ride a bike to work!

This was a reasonably comprehensive TV report, which of course meant a lot was left out. They did address the big deal in the room, the String of Pearls requirement, without ever touching on the stupid planning that has resulted in us mostly having nothing but boring vacuous suburbia. Corbell’s mild understatement was “City Planning is not perfect”!

Most interesting was watching the bean counters selectively counting the beans. Cars and freeways apparently are free! So THAT’s why we put them everywhere! What a bargain!

Such a huge concern for the well being of Money with a feigned concern for the health of the populace, both of which are apparently only threatened by public transport: “How many people are going to DIE because of the Tram?” said in anguished tones by one of the more “rational” opponents.

The Liberal leader, a self confessed Light Rail neutral, is so concerned about the money that he will rip up the tracks no matter what the cost!

The Velez-Malaga Light Rail, which failed because it never ran into the cities, was given as a warning against inappropriate transport design, but oddly SEVEN bankrupted Spanish freeways didn’t seem worth mentioning.

The only real concerns expressed by everyone were how fast (Bike!) and how much (Bike!).

No real mention of the environment and that roads will predictably get slower and slower and ever more expensive, as they have everywhere else in the world.

There was an interesting but brief look at the (4 lane) busway in Brisbane. Pity this is not Smellavision and the need to hear the reporter meant the ambient traffic noise was suppressed.

I noticed how many Gungahlin bus passengers stand and the traveller seemed to think it “lucky” they got a seat. Meanwhile the reporter and interviewee on the Gold Coast Light Rail were both seated and able to have a normal conversation both inside and outside the tram.

At least it had everybody talking about the options, even as perceived death sentences. But no mention of the death toll that has virtually killed the Gold Coast tourist industry as a result of their Light Rail!

rubaiyat said :

Someone asked what Malcolm Turnbull has done that is any different:

“Mr Turnbull arrived by tram with Mayor Tom Tate before facing a large media pack, where he said it was hard to imagine a better project to commence his commitment to funding public infrastructure based on MERIT instead of IDEOLOGY.”

Take 2 :

Yeah – “MERIT”. That’s why the Fed’s tipped in about m$400+ into the Gold Coast Tram and nothing into the ACTs Tram. Because the ACTs Benefits Cost Ratio (BCR) was m$1:1.2 so from a “MERIT” perspective, the Gold Coast Tram, with it’s much higher BCR, got the Feds $. That’s why the PM rode it – to support Federal funding of it.

On the other hand, with the weak BCR of 1:1.2, the ACT Gov’t funding submission was deemed not worthy of Federal $ because there wasn’t enough “MERIT” in it compared to the other, & so it became a Public Private Partnership – fully funded by ACT Ratepayers/residents without any Federal funding injection.

Makes sense in context of the poor quality of decision making and fiscal priority setting of this ACT Labor/Greens Government, caused by the apathy of ACT voters to accept such decisions.

I can not see the PM riding the Gunners-Civic ACT Tram.

justin heywood8:10 pm 27 Nov 15

KentFitch said :

Kim Fischer said :

It mostly comes down to the fact that trams can transport more people than buses in a given corridor. The capacity to transport more people makes higher density developments more viable.

Yet.. http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/TramsForCanberra/tramsAndCanberra.html

Currently ACTION provides capacity for 2860 seats, 4473 seat+standing and 120 bikes in AM commuter period (6:30-09:00) from Gungahlin to Civic. Capital Metro say in 2020 they’ll provide 1495 seats, 4508 seat+standing, 92 bikes in the same period. And by then the population will have grown, and whereas ACTION now have a capacity of 74.1 passengers per 1000 Gungahlin residents, the tram capacity will be just 61.8. Seated capacity will have dropped from 47.4 seats per 1000 residents to 20.5. And this is a better transport service?

Now, Capital Metro could run more frequent trams (although that is limited by the electricity sub-station capacity along the route), but their EIS model already shows severe congestion in the surrounding road network due to signal priority (traffic delays at intersections on the route increase by 44% in 2021 in AM and PM peaks directly due to the Stage 1 project), and it gets exponentially worse if frequency increases.

As an ardent supporter of universal and egalitarian transport, and as a believer that personal mobility is vital for economic and social participation, and that more roads and more private car ownership make the problem worse, not better, I am very sad to see how the tram will set back public transport for decades. I know many of the people involved in the project, from Simon Corbell and Shane Rattenbury down, had the best of motivations. But they were misled – the rail transport industry lobby is just as self-interested as any other. Simon Corbell’s requirement (and Capital Metro’s promise) of a rapid public transport service “backbone” across Canberra, providing a 20 min trip from Gungahlin to Civic was quietly dropped. Then peak frequency was backed off. The project is now doomed.

There’s no shame in admitting you’ve been misled, it hasn’t worked out, and rethinking your approach.

On the contrary, there is now a huge amount of political capital built up behind light rail and I think any kind of admission of errors in planning would be seen as a humiliating backdown. I can’t see a way they could do it and save face.

Excellent link btw.

Do you agree that mixed-use developments make Canberra more liveable and sustainable?

Only if its done correctly.

Kingston Foreshore – good
Lonsdale Street – good
Belco Town Centre – no good. The whole area there between Lake Ginninderra College and the Water Police part has been an eyesore for the 25yrs I’ve been here.
Tuggers – See above
Between McKeller and Charnwood (North of Ginninderra Drive) – Another shocker. There’s a bit of life at Charny now, but where are the social, recreational and leisure services really?

They’re no better elsewhere unfortunately…

Googong – No…

rommeldog56 said :

Nilrem said :

rommeldog56 said :

From the OP : “One conversation we need to have more is about the function of the Capital Metro tram as more than just a commuter solution.”

But a commuter solution to try to fix some of the poor planning by successive ACT Gov’t in Gunners, is just what it is. Trying to backwards reengineer that or spin it to be anything else is, is just disingenuous and insulting. After the Tram leaves Dickson and before it reaches Civic, there are 3 stops.

Apart from the fact that its missing Braddon completely, I can not envisage 3 stops reinvigorating Northborne Avenue to any great extent – especially if passengers have to walk to a Tram stop on Northborne Ave at night in the dead of a Canberra winter.

The Planned Eloura Street stop is only two (narrow) blocks from Lonsdale Street.

The tram stop is in the middle of Northborne Ave, which u have to cross in order to progress across those two blocks to into Lonsdale street.

So, it does miss Braddon completely.

Yeah, technically correct, but hardly a major impediment to the stop servicing Braddon.

KentFitch said :

Currently ACTION provides capacity for 2860 seats, 4473 seat+standing and 120 bikes in AM commuter period (6:30-09:00) from Gungahlin to Civic. Capital Metro say in 2020 they’ll provide 1495 seats, 4508 seat+standing, 92 bikes in the same period. And by then the population will have grown, and whereas ACTION now have a capacity of 74.1 passengers per 1000 Gungahlin residents, the tram capacity will be just 61.8. Seated capacity will have dropped from 47.4 seats per 1000 residents to 20.5. And this is a better transport service?

Just on the face of it those figures seem wrong, because the proposed peak hour frequency of the buses and trams are the same, every 5 minutes, and the tram has double the capacity of the largest bendy bus which has 65 seated + 42 standing, total 107 passengers.

We don’t know what model Tram will be used yet, but typically a Bombardier Flexity 2 tram has 74 seated + 148 standing total 222 passengers. So more seats and definitely twice as many passengers. There are higher capacity trams.

The link goes to a very dense website, some of which I have seen before. The same alarm bells ring when you look at simple figures such as above and fudged data such as claims for shared autonomous cars “Just around the corner” with 4.8 passengers per vehicle. Really? We only get an average of 1.1 passengers now and autonomous cars are proposed to run around empty to pick up passengers or to remote park, yet somehow they are at near full capacity on average?

By contrast peak hour trams in Melbourne actually run at up to 112% of capacity. In real life, in this universe and this dimension, not some virtual GIGO analysis.

Trams are clean, quiet and do not use up much space which is why they can be run in inner city residential areas and down green centre strips unobtrusively. No way buses and cars can do that. Particularly cars. Trams are particularly suitable for mixed pedestrian areas in Town Centres like the Bourke Street Mall.

There are plenty of sources for the known capacity of dedicated bus lanes vs rail transit, I have sited them numerous times. Buses simply can not match Light Rail, unless you build very expensive multi-lane busways with completely divided rights of way and overhead passes. All of which are clumsy, polluting, extremely noisy and unpleasant.

How are we doing with those other “just around the corner” options such as hover cars and “Clean Coal”?

Meanwhile Canberra just keeps getting hotter and the roads keep getting more congested.

Nilrem said :

rommeldog56 said :

From the OP : “One conversation we need to have more is about the function of the Capital Metro tram as more than just a commuter solution.”

But a commuter solution to try to fix some of the poor planning by successive ACT Gov’t in Gunners, is just what it is. Trying to backwards reengineer that or spin it to be anything else is, is just disingenuous and insulting. After the Tram leaves Dickson and before it reaches Civic, there are 3 stops.

Apart from the fact that its missing Braddon completely, I can not envisage 3 stops reinvigorating Northborne Avenue to any great extent – especially if passengers have to walk to a Tram stop on Northborne Ave at night in the dead of a Canberra winter.

The Planned Eloura Street stop is only two (narrow) blocks from Lonsdale Street.

The tram stop is in the middle of Northborne Ave, which u have to cross in order to progress across those two blocks to into Lonsdale street. So, it does miss Braddon completely.

BenjaminRose1991 said :

Wouldn’t it make more sense just to increase zoning density in North Canberra (O’Connor, Ainslie, Lyneham, and Dickson), South Canberra (Yarralumla, Deakin, Griffith, Forrest, and Red Hill), and in the town centres? You know the population and employment centres of the ACT.

Not sure if you have noticed but that is exactly what they are doing. Go to O’Connor, Turner, Forrest, Kingston etc etc etc and you will find a much higher density than most places in Canberra.

But nothing wrong with increasing it elsewhere, who knows it may well attract more people who will create demand for new business which in turn will create jobs and voila you have population and employment centres with people living in those areas.

Kim Fischer said :

It mostly comes down to the fact that trams can transport more people than buses in a given corridor. The capacity to transport more people makes higher density developments more viable.

Yet.. http://www.projectcomputing.com/resources/cacs/TramsForCanberra/tramsAndCanberra.html

Currently ACTION provides capacity for 2860 seats, 4473 seat+standing and 120 bikes in AM commuter period (6:30-09:00) from Gungahlin to Civic. Capital Metro say in 2020 they’ll provide 1495 seats, 4508 seat+standing, 92 bikes in the same period. And by then the population will have grown, and whereas ACTION now have a capacity of 74.1 passengers per 1000 Gungahlin residents, the tram capacity will be just 61.8. Seated capacity will have dropped from 47.4 seats per 1000 residents to 20.5. And this is a better transport service?

Now, Capital Metro could run more frequent trams (although that is limited by the electricity sub-station capacity along the route), but their EIS model already shows severe congestion in the surrounding road network due to signal priority (traffic delays at intersections on the route increase by 44% in 2021 in AM and PM peaks directly due to the Stage 1 project), and it gets exponentially worse if frequency increases.

As an ardent supporter of universal and egalitarian transport, and as a believer that personal mobility is vital for economic and social participation, and that more roads and more private car ownership make the problem worse, not better, I am very sad to see how the tram will set back public transport for decades. I know many of the people involved in the project, from Simon Corbell and Shane Rattenbury down, had the best of motivations. But they were misled – the rail transport industry lobby is just as self-interested as any other. Simon Corbell’s requirement (and Capital Metro’s promise) of a rapid public transport service “backbone” across Canberra, providing a 20 min trip from Gungahlin to Civic was quietly dropped. Then peak frequency was backed off. The project is now doomed.

There’s no shame in admitting you’ve been misled, it hasn’t worked out, and rethinking your approach.

I find any discussion about development oddly uninteresting. The writing on the wall says that the government of the day will go ahead with whatever development proposal is shuffled towards ACTPLA because of its economic benefits. The various bits and pieces of legislation/regulation/plans, etc that are there to ensure the development is done the right way are just lip-service. An example of the flawed legislative instruments include the Multi Unit Housing Development Code. There are rules and then there are criteria. If the developer completely ignores the rules then they can propose some touchy feely alternative full of buzzwords like amenity to overcome the rules that were put there for a good reason. I don’t even know why rules are included when it is clear that no developer takes much notice of them if they are too hard to achieve which then leaves the anti development people scratching their collective heads wondering why the rules are being ignored.

I don’t know when the term ‘Y-Plan’ first came into common usage,but when I arrived in Canberra in ‘Feb. ’66,after a bit of touring to get the lie of the land,it was the first thing I thought of.It’s easy to understand if you look at a Canberra map from ’64-’66.

rubaiyat said :

rommeldog56 said :

Kim Fischer said :

Thanks for your question. I have always declared my intention to seek preselection for the ALP in my author bio. I am proud to say that over the weekend the rank and file members of the ALP voted for me to be one of the five candidates for Ginninderra.

I expect the party office to make an official announcement about the candidates for each of the electorates some time this week.

Kim Fischer
#BetterBelconnen

Well, that would explain some previous comments on here then.

No matter which party, if a candidate is contributing to discussion here, it should be disclosed prominently on each contribution/post, not tucked away in bio’s, in the small print, etc.

What difference does it really make?

Help you to instantly agree? Or shut your ears to anything worthwhile, because the wrong side is speaking?

Nobody is stopping you thinking for yourself.

Yeah that is my concern as well. It really should not matter when writing articles on a website. If its from the “other” party is it just so one can instantly ignore anything they say? Some people don’t like to read facts and think for themselves, who knows what would happen if someone from Labor said something they agreed with or vice versa. One hopes we’ll get a collaborative government one day!

rommeldog56 said :

From the OP : “One conversation we need to have more is about the function of the Capital Metro tram as more than just a commuter solution.”

But a commuter solution to try to fix some of the poor planning by successive ACT Gov’t in Gunners, is just what it is. Trying to backwards reengineer that or spin it to be anything else is, is just disingenuous and insulting. After the Tram leaves Dickson and before it reaches Civic, there are 3 stops.

Apart from the fact that its missing Braddon completely, I can not envisage 3 stops reinvigorating Northborne Avenue to any great extent – especially if passengers have to walk to a Tram stop on Northborne Ave at night in the dead of a Canberra winter.

The Planned Eloura Street stop is only two (narrow) blocks from Lonsdale Street.

BenjaminRose19919:18 am 26 Nov 15

Wouldn’t it make more sense just to increase zoning density in North Canberra (O’Connor, Ainslie, Lyneham, and Dickson), South Canberra (Yarralumla, Deakin, Griffith, Forrest, and Red Hill), and in the town centres? You know the population and employment centres of the ACT.

Kim! If you want a group centre to redo then try Weston Creek. The group centre that should’ve been a town centre from the very beginning! Kippax is fine for the moment. However if you want an easy win – fix Kambah Village.

That’s right, buses are more agile!

It mostly comes down to the fact that trams can transport more people than buses in a given corridor. The capacity to transport more people makes higher density developments more viable.

I’m afraid that’s a furphy, Kim. Perhaps on a one to one basis, trams are larger than some buses (not sure about the long bendy buses though). BUT trams are so inflexible. Buses can transport more people from more areas to their desto faster, because they can overtake, take alt routes if there is a problem, and can generally adjust to demand, on demand. Also, trams are mostly standing room, so ‘more people’ pretty much means cattle class.

There is this rather large elephant in the room:

http://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.au/news/breaking-news/set-to-be-hottest-on-record-un/story-fnjbnxok-1227623232111

Surprising seeing that it is being reported in a Murdoch publication, but then given the obvious success of the GCLR it is hard to find the baby eating demons after the LightRail is built for all to see. The Bulletin also reports that the UK is scrapping its Carbon Capture Scheme, probably because they couldn’t find a carpet big enough to sweep all the carbon under.

Someone asked what Malcolm Turnbull has done that is any different:

“Mr Turnbull arrived by tram with Mayor Tom Tate before facing a large media pack, where he said it was hard to imagine a better project to commence his commitment to funding public infrastructure based on MERIT instead of IDEOLOGY.”

http://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.au/prime-minister-malcolm-turnbull-will-today-announce-federal-funding-for-light-rail-stage-2/story-fnj94hf2-1227564947983

Masquara said :

Kim Fischer, just wondering why these “social opportunities” wouldn’t be “unlocked” by other, less expensive public transport options? Can you give detail? Many thanks!

Like polluting noisy buses that people don’t like to ride on?

Every single development around the world shows that it is not any old physical method of public transport that enhances and stimulates higher density living. The Gold Coast as an example had buses running up and down the main strip. The new GC Light Rail line has set off a building boom and patronage has rocketed and is growing steadily. A clear demonstration of the effect. The Liberal NP mayor has completely been won over after having vehemently opposed Light Rail, he is demanding all the extensions to the line get built, as it has passed the “Reality Study”. He described building Light Rail as a “No brainer”.

http://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.au/news/traffic-reports/exclusive-figures-show-gold-coast-light-rails-first-year-a-success/story-fnl6qvfc-1227448259597

Much more user friendly, non polluting, less noisy and non-stinky, smooth riding, safe rail attracts residents around it in a way that busways do not.

In the long run rail is not just cleaner it is also cheaper. Vastly cheaper than cars and freeways and certainly cheaper than buses as usage ramps up, without the need to increase the number of bus lanes or car lanes.

Rail uses 2% of the energy of even buses, let alone cars, and since it runs on electricity that energy can be clean and renewable. Potential electric buses and cars still consume far too much road space and being rubber wheels on bitumen they are subject to much more friction, create far too much noise and damage the road surface they operate on.

rubaiyat said :

What difference does it really make? Help you to instantly agree? Or shut your ears to anything worthwhile, because the wrong side is speaking? Nobody is stopping you thinking for yourself.

I fully realise that many posters on here are out of keeping with your views, but I would have thought that, once standing or at least nominating for the Legislative Assembly, those candidates should self declare prominently in their postings – so RA is doing the right thing. If candidates can not be trusted to do that so that their comments can be put into context by the casual reader or they hide behind false names or use proxies, then nor can they be trusted if elected to office.

At least John Hargraves ex mla declares as such on here when posting the party line.

Many people don’t think for themselves and are easily influenced by what they read/hear – especially Government spin. If that were not the case, then the radio shock jocks would be out of a job.

Masquara said :

Kim Fischer, just wondering why these “social opportunities” wouldn’t be “unlocked” by other, less expensive public transport options? Can you give detail? Many thanks!

It mostly comes down to the fact that trams can transport more people than buses in a given corridor. The capacity to transport more people makes higher density developments more viable.

I am not kimbelco in case anyone is wondering.

Technology has defeated me yet again. My post out of the quotation italics

I think you might be overstating this. The only thing I’ve heard is that the Community Council was expressing surprise that they were not informed of this. The really big signs on site, advertisements, links to websites, the site sales unit and stories in the CT was the giveaway for me but they should have been given an info session.

A more accurate statement would be that ‘A couple of people in Gungahlin are mildly piqued about not being informed…’ Good will and peace to all mankind is part of living in Gungahlin.

Kim Fischer, just wondering why these “social opportunities” wouldn’t be “unlocked” by other, less expensive public transport options? Can you give detail? Many thanks!

Garfield said :

Hello Kim, I’m guessing that you’re the Kim Fischer the Canberra Times has reported today as having won preselection for the ALP in Ginninderra for next year’s ACT election. I’m not commenting for or against your article, but as an ALP candidate don’t you think the public interest would be best served by mentioning that when talking down the Liberals opposition to the tram?

Hear hear. Riotact – response from the Liberals would be welcome!

Charlotte Harper10:42 am 25 Nov 15

We have in fact spoken to the Liberals about getting more voices from their side of politics on the site. Watch this space.

dungfungus said :

You were doing well until the last paragraph.
If people work live and play in these multi-use developments they have no need to commute or really go anywhere so why suggest a tram be involved? I know it is part of the party narrative but even if the planned City – Gungahlin route goes ahead the rest of Canberra won’t see a tram for many years if at all.
I nee today that the failed Brisbane Airport road tunnel (funded be a PPP) was sold for $2.8billion less than the construction cost!
Also, using the words “sustainable” and “vibrant” indicates that any proposal that uses them is going to be unviable (like the Brisbane Airport Tunnel).

You were doing well until you posted.

You were the only one who suggested that people “work live and play in these multi-use developments” need never go anywhere else and therefore do not need transport. Everyone else knows that they do.

And I thought Brisbane “needed” that road tunnel! All that beautiful pollution generated underground then vented on some poor neighbours in delightfully concentrated form.

You were doing well until the last paragraph.
If people work live and play in these multi-use developments they have no need to commute or really go anywhere so why suggest a tram be involved? I know it is part of the party narrative but even if the planned City – Gungahlin route goes ahead the rest of Canberra won’t see a tram for many years if at all.
I nee today that the failed Brisbane Airport road tunnel (funded be a PPP) was sold for $2.8billion less than the construction cost!
Also, using the words “sustainable” and “vibrant” indicates that any proposal that uses them is going to be unviable (like the Brisbane Airport Tunnel).

rubaiyat said :

The problems of the “separation of use” were bleeding obvious and already much talked about in the ’60s with the failures of the same ideas in Britain.

But the Canberra Town Planners bravely ploughed on with the “Joy though Emptiness” of Belconnen, Tuggeranong, and the “Y Plan” which was just another attempt at making sense of something that never made sense: the bureaucratic interference and random attempts at stumbling onto something that “looked like” design, since they had successfully sabotaged WBG’s original plan for Canberra.

The conflicting intents and broken land allocation make a joke of everything that comes out of ACT planning, who seem to ignore climate, solar orientation, protection from winter winds, traffic flow, visual design, landscape and everything you would think might have been raised as pertinent to their chosen profession.

Instead what we have is pointless lines drawn all over the map, randomly buckling to commercial pressures, Wannabe features culled from magazines, and no quality control or checking on outcomes. In other words the shamble we have now.

I am surprised to say this, but I agree with some of your comments.

Even today, the good people of Gunners are claimed to be up in arms about high rises planned for the Gunners CBD that were approved immediately before new height restrictions were introduced under which, these newly approved high rises would apparently not have been approved. I wonder what consideration was given to aspect, quality of construction, aesthetics, road/traffic impact, etc.

Still, the Tram is coming to Gunners CBD, so they will have to suck that up I suppose – take any good with the bad.

Had a look at a unit in a high rise in Wright last weekend. It didn’t even have double glazed windows and construction/finish, for a display unit, was quite poor. Because all the balconies are vertically on top of each other (instead of staggered) the balcony of unit above blocks out all the east sun to that unit, the hallways look like something out of a 1960s high rise in the USSR – or from a hotel. Yuck.

justin heywood7:35 am 24 Nov 15

rommeldog56 said :

…..No matter which party, if a candidate is contributing to discussion here, it should be disclosed prominently on each contribution/post, not tucked away in bio’s, in the small print, etc.

What would be the point of that on an anonymous forum? You just have to modify your name slightly or get a staffer to do it.

An occasional poster named Kimbelco has been here doing regular head-kicking on behalf of the local ALP since at least 2012.

drfelonious said :

I think the most important para in your post is the one where you mention the need for collective consent.

Sometimes you can only get a bare majority in favour of something, but you need to do everything in your power to get that majority, not shove something down the community’s throat.

I’m a big fan of the tram, but it is becoming increasingly evident to me that Andrew Barr is on an ideological crusade to redevelop Canberra and the views of local communities are regularly ignored. If this was part of a deeply held belief that the city would be better for mixed used development it wouldn’t be so hard to swallow, but I believe that much of the redevelopment is more about pulling in revenue from developers.

The contumelious disregard for the views of local Mawson residents about building heights in the latest Mawson plan is a case in point. A show was made of seeking community feedback, it was overwhelmingly against heights over 4 stories (over two rounds of feedback) but the marching orders are clear from the Chief Minister: BUILD IT ANYWAY!

Where’s the collective consent?

Collective consent is the ideal situation and should no doubt be an objective but lets face it, almost impossible to active on anything. After all, to get more than half the vote on being elected to represent the people in a compulsory vote is a major achievement. Historically it is less than that in a referendum where one party (for most often political reasons) is against any proposal.

If the traditional community consultation model is followed it is dominated by one demographic. If newer social media type consultation models are followed, it is arguably skewed to a different demographic. Inarguably the majority of the community is apathetic about any planning proposition, until it is implemented and the consequences impossible to ignore.

I believe that in most cases the consultation process is not at issue. The two major issues is that firstly, the Planning Authority has already made up its mind on the merits and is trying to convince or defend any proposal. By personal experience I know that they believe that they are the planners and hence superior in their subject matter knowledge with the corollary being that the residents views are mis-informed and hence its information not consultation that is necessary.

Secondly, the vast majority of people really don’t give a toss about planning changes up to and including the DA stage. Even after construction, it is only until or if people are inconvenienced that they care on the negative side or if they benefit on the positive side.

From the OP : “The social opportunities unlocked by the tram are substantial and it would be a shame if they were ignored because of short-sighted thinking from certain political groups.”

Now that we know the OP is standing for Labor in the ACT election, that comment makes more sense.

So, how short sighted is this. Where is the integrated transport plan for Canberra – based around the 2nd loss making public transport system, the Tram (in addition to ACTION). The only short sighted thinking from “certain political groups”, is coming from the ACT Labor/Greens Government and their war chest of monopoly money – donated by ACT Ratepayers to developers and Tram consortia.

Yep – you just have to love the robotic rethoric of politicians and aspiring politicians from either party – it’s just more from the same script. And there is another 12 months of this spin to go…….groan….

From the OP : “One conversation we need to have more is about the function of the Capital Metro tram as more than just a commuter solution.”

But a commuter solution to try to fix some of the poor planning by successive ACT Gov’t in Gunners, is just what it is. Trying to backwards reengineer that or spin it to be anything else is, is just disingenuous and insulting. After the Tram leaves Dickson and before it reaches Civic, there are 3 stops. Apart from the fact that its missing Braddon completely, I can not envisage 3 stops reinvigorating Northborne Avenue to any great extent – especially if passengers have to walk to a Tram stop on Northborne Ave at night in the dead of a Canberra winter.

From the OP : “It is essential that collective consent for the lifestyle and behavioural changes needed to ensure sustainable growth is attained. Collective consent creates a sense of ownership across a community. This requires open and transparent conversations, using a range of techniques and media, in developing a vision for the future.”

Does “open and transparent conversation” include :

. Investing b$1 of ratepayers money based on a benefits costs ratio (BCR) in the Tram business case of 1:1.2 ? There wouldn’t be a private sector company that would stay viable with that sort of investment strategy – even if it had a social objective.

. Not fully evaluating all other alternatives – just focusing on the Tram.

. Does “techniques” mean engineering survey questions/outcomes to claim that there is support for the Tram ? By signing contracts before the next election so locking in future genertations into a public private partnership contract.

. If the “vision” includes the laughable timeframe of extending the Tram to other CBDs over a 25 year timeframe, then it will remain only a vision. That timeframe is far, far too long – it is aspirational only (like “No Waste by 2008”) – to get ACT Labor/Greens out of the flack they were copping from the electorate over stage 1.

Unfortunately, any “collective consent/sense of ownership” was lost in the TRAM project early on.

> Residents will be able to choose between different precincts and a range of building heights including an urban village (1 to 6 storeys), village edge (1 to 4 storeys), and garden suburbs (1-2 storeys).

A garden suburb? that would be a change! Over the life of the Labor government, every new suburb has had smaller and smaller blocks. How can you have a Garden suburb when every house is 200m2 on a 400m2 block?

> The higher density regions are designed from the ground up to integrate a variety of uses that will ensure greater vibrancy and a more consistent level of public activity.

When has a higher density ‘region’ right on the literal edge of town ever worked out? No matter what your party and the developers try to sell us, it will be a dead space at night filled with nothing but low income apartment housing and closed shops.

There will never be any major employment in West Belconnen. It will be just like Gungahlin – everyone will drive a car (stuck in traffic on the insufficient roads that the ALP always seems to deliver) or spend hours on the underfunded bus network to get to work.

West Belconnen/Parkwood should be >800m2 blocks for upper income people to build nice new houses surrounded by gardens. Not a some social experiment that is merely an excuse to squeeze the most revenue from land sales.

High density and mixed use belongs in the areas close to anything. West Belconnen is going to be built in the boonies against and over the NSW border >30mins from ANYWHERE.

It’s the last good bit of land in ACT and the ALP is going to screw over the people of Canberra once again by delivering ANOTHER over built suburb where the only trees are on the nature strip and the token parks no one sends their kids to unsupervised.

The ALP has it backwards, the outer suburbs should not be more compact and claustrophobic. That crap belongs in places close to anything. The policy should be about turning the inner suburbs into mixed use (duel occupancy and multi story apartments) and building new actual garden suburbs further out.

Personally, I think the ALP will just make it back in the coming election and the last chance of building decent new area worth of our garden city will be lost forever.

I think the most important para in your post is the one where you mention the need for collective consent.

Sometimes you can only get a bare majority in favour of something, but you need to do everything in your power to get that majority, not shove something down the community’s throat.

I’m a big fan of the tram, but it is becoming increasingly evident to me that Andrew Barr is on an ideological crusade to redevelop Canberra and the views of local communities are regularly ignored. If this was part of a deeply held belief that the city would be better for mixed used development it wouldn’t be so hard to swallow, but I believe that much of the redevelopment is more about pulling in revenue from developers.

The contumelious disregard for the views of local Mawson residents about building heights in the latest Mawson plan is a case in point. A show was made of seeking community feedback, it was overwhelmingly against heights over 4 stories (over two rounds of feedback) but the marching orders are clear from the Chief Minister: BUILD IT ANYWAY!

Where’s the collective consent?

rommeldog56 said :

Kim Fischer said :

Thanks for your question. I have always declared my intention to seek preselection for the ALP in my author bio. I am proud to say that over the weekend the rank and file members of the ALP voted for me to be one of the five candidates for Ginninderra.

I expect the party office to make an official announcement about the candidates for each of the electorates some time this week.

Kim Fischer
#BetterBelconnen

Well, that would explain some previous comments on here then.

No matter which party, if a candidate is contributing to discussion here, it should be disclosed prominently on each contribution/post, not tucked away in bio’s, in the small print, etc.

What difference does it really make?

Help you to instantly agree? Or shut your ears to anything worthwhile, because the wrong side is speaking?

Nobody is stopping you thinking for yourself.

Kim Fischer said :

Thanks for your question. I have always declared my intention to seek preselection for the ALP in my author bio. I am proud to say that over the weekend the rank and file members of the ALP voted for me to be one of the five candidates for Ginninderra.

I expect the party office to make an official announcement about the candidates for each of the electorates some time this week.

Kim Fischer
#BetterBelconnen

Well, that would explain some previous comments on here then.

No matter which party, if a candidate is contributing to discussion here, it should be disclosed prominently on each contribution/post, not tucked away in bio’s, in the small print, etc.

Charlotte Harper5:49 pm 23 Nov 15

I agree. As I have replied elsewhere, Kim’s candidacy will be mentioned at the end of each of her RiotACT stories from now on (pending official confirmation as per her note).

The problems of the “separation of use” were bleeding obvious and already much talked about in the ’60s with the failures of the same ideas in Britain.

But the Canberra Town Planners bravely ploughed on with the “Joy though Emptiness” of Belconnen, Tuggeranong, and the “Y Plan” which was just another attempt at making sense of something that never made sense: the bureaucratic interference and random attempts at stumbling onto something that “looked like” design, since they had successfully sabotaged WBG’s original plan for Canberra.

The conflicting intents and broken land allocation make a joke of everything that comes out of ACT planning, who seem to ignore climate, solar orientation, protection from winter winds, traffic flow, visual design, landscape and everything you would think might have been raised as pertinent to their chosen profession.

Instead what we have is pointless lines drawn all over the map, randomly buckling to commercial pressures, Wannabe features culled from magazines, and no quality control or checking on outcomes. In other words the shamble we have now.

Thanks for your question. I have always declared my intention to seek preselection for the ALP in my author bio. I am proud to say that over the weekend the rank and file members of the ALP voted for me to be one of the five candidates for Ginninderra.

I expect the party office to make an official announcement about the candidates for each of the electorates some time this week.

Kim Fischer
#BetterBelconnen

Hello Kim, I’m guessing that you’re the Kim Fischer the Canberra Times has reported today as having won preselection for the ALP in Ginninderra for next year’s ACT election. I’m not commenting for or against your article, but as an ALP candidate don’t you think the public interest would be best served by mentioning that when talking down the Liberals opposition to the tram?

Charlotte Harper2:35 pm 23 Nov 15

She is indeed, as we have also reported today, and all Kim’s articles from now on will include a tagline stating she is a candidate.

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