Parton's busway punt could come back to haunt Liberals at yet another light rail election

Is this rage bait? It’s so incredibly clearly wrong that it must be a joke. Light rail is bigger and more successful than BRT throughout Europe and North America and almost no one has “trackless trams” outside of a couple of cities in China.

That’s rubbish. I’m a semi-regular visitor to Europe (mainly Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and most cities and larger townships have wired trams.
As an aside, I took a video of two trams travelling in opposite directions down the middle of a busy road in CBD Magdeburg to show people that other vehicles and pedestrians can share the road quite happily without incident. Why can’t we achieve this here when our tram uses a dedicated corridor with traffic lights and crossings?

You mean No city are adopting busways or trackless trams. At least 20 cities in the USA have built or extended their light rail in the past decade or 2. Europe would be significantly higher, they have a far superior network of rail and light rail to most parts of the world, with Asia quickly catching up. What they’d discoved with these trackless trams is they need to reinforce the road with concrete and thats costing around as much as rail is, but requiring more maintenance and more prone to issues. No one in the world are used buses as the backbone of there Public transport. Thats far more factual than your statement, which is easily disproved with a quick google or even a visit to many cities in the USA and Europe.

Sarcasm radar not operating this afternoon.

Has anyone heard from chewy?

Yoohoo!

No worries Jack,
easily answered with the information already provided in Mark’s comment.

“The missing link isn’t just the bridge but the entire length of Commonwealth Ave. North of the bridge, there wouldn’t be room to add a bus lane unless the Liberals backflip on their promise and cancel the light rail stage 2A contract”

This is actually a major failing of the current government’s decision to proceed with Stage 2A as an independent project with huge costs for almost no identified benefit. They never should have signed contracts for it in the first place, it’s a major planning failure but does create a lovely political wedge. To use this as an argument against the Liberals plan is nonsensical.

“South of the bridge there is no room without removing trees on either the median or the outside verges.

Yes, so a busway can do exactly the same thing as light rail is proposing to do. From a planning perspective it’s a non-issue and the idea that the NCA would see an inherent difference for removing trees for light rail or a busway on this route seems quite irrational.

The rest of Mark’s comments just outlines exactly how a bus option could be delivered cheaply without major infrastructure by working with the federal government and NCA to provide a more efficient public transport option through a removal of a traffic lane along the bridge until such time as a higher capacity option could be justified in the long term.

Politically, the Liberals may well not support that more efficient option due to the issues raised by Mark but those are once again political rather than planning, transport or infrastructure issues. As I’m not a Liberal supporter, they are quite irrelevant.

And it’s also ironic because the same types of political decisions are being made by the ALP/Greens on the project to move forward with light rail despite the fact it doesn’t create the best outcomes for the ACT public transport network or economic position.

For light rail the answer to any technical problem is to “throw more money at it”, seen most recently with the idea of a new tunnel for part of the route. It’s extraordinarily hypocritical to then claim a bus system won’t work due to technical reasons, when extra funding would similarly fix them.

But people like Jack D don’t actually care about the detailed planning information, their support is unequivocal no matter what the evidence says.

The NCA may or may not have a problem with it, but the whole claim the libs were making was that their plan would be significantly faster and not need NCA approval, which self-evidently isn’t true.

Another problem area in the liberal plan is going west between Adelaide Ave and Commonwealth Ave, as there’s only one traffic lane down to State Circle and no lane at all up to Commonwealth ave. Considering how quickly the dumped the commonwealth bridge section I imagine this area would be consigned to to-hard basket too.

Areaman,
as above, the same issues exist for the light rail route and the government’s transparency is almost non existent on how they will be solved, how much it will cost and when it will happen by.

You can’t be critical of one, whilst ignoring the same types of technical flaws in the other.

The fact that the politicians on either side are spinning their own positions to suit themselves in an election year is exactly the problem for what should be a planning and infrastructure led project, rather than an ideological play thing.

The planning for light rail route has been super transparent, even if the costings have been less so. The difference however is that the government are admitting that light rail we be slow to build, require lots of approvals but give a better outcome. The libs are contrasting that by saying their solution will be faster, cheaper, not require approvals and still give a good outcome. However now it appears that the liberal solution either wouldn’t be as fast and approval free as they claim or wouldn’t provide any real benefits . So they both have some similar issues around speed of delivery and approval but the government never claimed those as advantages of their plan, whereas the libs did.

Areaman,
The planning for the route has not remotely been transparent, they still don’t have a preferred option despite committing to completing the project.

Travel along the route and issues like how to traverse on/off State Circle is still not solved, with very little information released to the public.

They have claimed performance and travel times will be similar to existing buses when it clearly won’t be and they’ve provided no information to back up their statements.

Their claims around the difficulty in approvals is more around blaming the NCA for delays that are more around their own schedule and funding issues, rather than admitting inherent project difficulties.

They haven’t even done an option study nor released a business case to show it provides a “better outcome”.

Transparency is non existent.

It’s also partially unfair to compare the technical issues around the policy of an opposition party compared to a government who has access to the resources of entire departments of public servants and is spending tens of millions of dollars on design contracts to address.

The Liberal policy has issues that need more investigation and development work to assess. But they cant do any of that work until they win government due to resoucing.

They could choose to trade-off lower costs for longer travel times by sharing traffic routes with normal traffic in certain areas and then running on dedicated infrastructure elsewhere.

All of these issues should have been sorted out early in the project through an options investigation and analysis phase. It’s damning on the government that they didn’t even bother with considering alternatives.

They took taking light rail to Woden to the election, so that’s non-negotiable, and if that is taken as a given then they’ve been very open. They have a preferred route which they’ve been clear about, they’re just also listing an alternative route to cover their bases and not slow the project down any more than it already is. The most recent plans detail the cut and cover tunnel between State circle and Commonwealth ave and the signalised intersection between State circle and Adelaide ave.

Opposition policies might need more work once they get into government but that’s not a free pass for making stupid basic mistakes that are clear to anyone who is paying attention. If one obvious question from a PTCBR member can bring the whole thing crashing down then it wasn’t well thought out to begin with, doubly so as there a half dozen other equally obvious problems with their plan that the libs are still dodging.

chewy14 the government does have a preferred option, see: https://yoursayconversations.act.gov.au/light-rail-to-woden/have-your-say-parliament-house-precinct

The documents listed on the right side of the screen include the ‘Parliament House Precinct Plan – State Circle East preferred alignment’ which shows the proposed location of stops and connections between Commonwealth Ave and State Circle and between State Circle and Adelaide Ave.

It also shows the alternative more indirect route via Barton, which is being worked up as an alternative in case the State Circle route is deemed unacceptable by the NCA or Parliament. The minister Chris Steel says that the more direct State Circle route is preferred for reasons of cost and journey time, and that design work to date has confirmed it’s feasible from both an engineering and cost perspective. Also both the NCA and the parliamentary committee undertaking the 2018 inquiry made it clear that State Circle is preferred as it’s on the endorsed public transit route.

I agree that the light rail project has dragged on far too long. But it’s now progressing through the cumbersome approval process. Fault lies with both the ACT government and the NCA, which under its previous leadership continued to block rather than facilitate the project until the writing was on the wall that both sides of federal parliament were behind it in principle (evidenced by funding for stage 2A from both the previous and current governments).

By contrast, the ACT Liberals plan is truly smoke and mirrors, as has been admitted by Mark Parton. If the Liberals were serious about fast electric buses they would have presented a plan for a busway with a continuous right of way between the City and Woden, with likely locations of stops and how passengers will access them (including at grade-separated stops on Adelaide Ave and Yarra Glen), and some evidence no matter how slight that the existing travel time could be maintained, all within the budget of $70 million. As it is, on the most congested section, the 3 km between London Circuit and State Circle, the buses will become increasingly stuck as the volume of traffic builds. Congestion, in which buses carrying 50 or more passengers are surrounded by single occupant cars, all stationery, is increasingly obvious, particularly northbound during the peaks.

Areaman,
“They took taking light rail to Woden to the election, so that’s non-negotiable, and if that is taken as a given then they’ve been very open.”

This doesn’t and should never be used to avoid proper infrastructure planning and decision making processes. Making election promises about delivering projects without due diligence is exactly what you’re complaining about the Liberals doing.

Election promises aren’t blank cheques, particularly for this type and scale of project.

I’m also OK if you have faith in the government’s statements about the preferred route, but keeping the alternative alive is actually further evidence that they haven’t done the necessary work to define the preferred solution in the first place.

“The most recent plans detail the cut and cover tunnel between State circle and Commonwealth ave and the signalised intersection between State circle and Adelaide ave.”

Which are only still preliminary, no decisions have been made. And they have only been able to be developed using the access to sigmificant resources that only the government has.

Before they released those route options, they were similar problems for the light rail plan. Before light rail developed a 3rd bridge option, they too couldn’t cross the lake.

Etc. Etc.

All the problems you have with the Liberal plan are the same types of issues that have existed with light rail since conception.

And they all have quite readily available technical solutions if the money can be spent on design and engineering solutions.

It’s not remotely comparing apples to apples to think light rail has an unlimited (and unannounced) budget for overcoming technical challenges but alternatives need to have solved them prior to completing any detailed development work or access to government funding.

Without a proper analysis of those costs , limitations and alternatives, along with the type and amount of benefit that will accrue, we cannot have a proper consideration of the optimal solution.

Which is exactly what any competent government would have done before locking in a solution to an ill defined problem.