The Gungahlin Drive fiasco – and it is a fiasco – shows yet again government failure over the past 20 years to see obvious connections between transport, population and planning policies.
Up to about the mid-1980s Canberra was set to develop as a series of town centres. Civic was to be one of five or six, not the big centre for the whole of Canberra. People would move between the five or six centres in roughly equal portions, so there would be no “peak hour” flow into and out of the city centre. Rather there would be multi-directional flow between the centres and the suburbs around them. It was called the Y-plan.
But the big developers detested that approach. Big money comes from forcing development in the centre. The big rents and the big parking fees come from cramming people and jobs into the centre. Big Commonwealth departments went along with this. It was fine for the selfish top echelon who had free parking provided at the workplace and wanted the amenity of classy restaurants and the like in Civic, and too bad for the wage slaves dragged into the city centre and forced to park miles away or pay through the nose.
Since the late 1980s big government departments have been moved to Civic. None has gone to Gungahlin.
The big commercial interests, too, constantly pressured for more development in Civic – higher buildings, less grass, fewer open carparks, more multi-level carparks. All in the interests of making greater returns. Land values and the rent from them usually go up with increased population density and taxpayer-provided infrastructure.
In those 20 years governments conceded to big development companies and the Y plan was destroyed contrary to the interests of the great bulk of the Canberra population. Big money could easily argue that “Canberra should be like any other city” with a dense CBD.
It has accelerated in the past five years in the name of “in-fill” and “a vibrant city centre”.
In the meantime, the transport mentality of most Canberrans did not change. They had come to expect and demand a right to drive to work; have cheap or free all-day parking; and have the convenience of being able to drive to various destinations on the way to a from work.
The two are incompatible. If you have a dense centre employing lots of people, they cannot all drive to work, particularly on a single lane of the doomed-to-choke Gungahlin Drive Extension. Any idiot, bar a government transport minister, could have told you that.
The Government made a hash of this. It failed even in the short term. It was not an ordinary, understandable, one-off blunder like the supermarket on the London Circuit. The Gungahlin Drive Extension was argued over and studied for years. This is was a PhD in traffic idiocy.
An Assembly committee should tease out the exact costs of doing this road in two bites instead of one, including all the time lost by motorists in road works.
Of course, if the longer term planning had not been hijacked none of this would have happened.
If the Gungahlin workforce had been divided among five or six town centres – importantly including Gungahlin itself – a freeway like Gungahlin Drive would have been unnecessary.
And even now with the extra lane, it will soon clog. The trouble is that cars can move just 2500 people an hour down a single land. Buses can quadruple that. Light rail can do six times better and heavy rail can do 20 times better. Ninety percent of a Telstra Stadium audience of 80,000 people can be cleared by trains in about an hour.
At 5000 people an hour, Gungahlin Drive will not cope shifting the 10,000 or more workers who want to use it in peak hour.
It seems Canberra is doomed to follow Sydney – poor public transport, endless money spent on inefficient road transport and a continuing mentality that public transport is something for others. At least Sydney had the slight advantage of always having a dense centre thus forcing public transport to develop with the city. Canberra has been lulled into a false belief that sensible decentralisation would be with us indefinitely.
Indeed, Canberra has the lowest patronage of any capital at 7.9 per cent. Sydney is highest at 26.3 per cent.
In all this not a thought seems to be given to population policy. Again governments are beholden to big business interests which thrive on more people coming to Australia. But the vast bulk of the existing population pays for it.
Why in heavens name does a government, like the ACT Government, spend money on a come-live-in-Canberra campaign when we have water restrictions, congestion of Gungahlin Drive which will cost $90 million to (temporarily) fix, and a housing-affordability crisis?
It is made worse by polices of the Federal Government. This week Treasurer Wayne Swan, when talking about the rent crisis, said the Government had to concentrate on the things it could control but failed to mention immigration – as if the two things were unrelated.
Governments have got to stop listening to people who make large amounts of money out of rising property prices brought about by rising population and rising density. All this is doing is making a few people wealthy to the impoverishment of the majority who spend more time and money getting to and from work; who spend more money servicing mortgages on over-priced land and whose environment is made worse by forever more land going under the bulldozer.
Incidentally, all of these people running development companies, consultancies and bureaucracies who laud high-density living almost to a person live in spacious houses with spacious gardens.
So before the ACT embarks on the next swathe of development – Molonglo – can we ask is it really necessary. And if we must have it, can we demand that our biggest industry – federal administration – have some significant employment there? Can we resist the pleadings of business to have more employment in Civic and avoid the Gungahlin mistake?
Gungahlin was built with virtually no local employment and poor public transport. People were force to commute, mostly by car. Small wonder the political pressure built up for bigger and better roads.
We should be more intelligent than that.
But my guess is that we will have a Molonglo Drive Extension fiasco of similar proportions in about a decade’s time.