A residents’ group has come into conflict with Canberra’s “sporting heartland” over controlling traffic from Belconnen to the city.
After the publication of the Territory Plan earlier this month, the North Canberra Protection Group said yesterday that Ginninderra Drive should be extended from its T-junction with Mouat Street to Northbourne Avenue rather than widening Mouat Street to take the Belconnen traffic.
The group said the $4 million proposal under the Territory Plan to widen Mouat Street would adversely affect residents with noise and would not provide as good a traffic flow as extending Ginninderra Drive to Northbourne Avenue.
The extension of Ginninderra Drive would cost about $6 million. It would go between the National Sports Centre and the Hockey Centre, running north of Southwell Park coming out on Northbourne Avenue between Yowani Country Club and the ACT Netball Centre.
A federal parliamentary committee into traffic flow from Gungahlin rejected the Ginninderra option in 1989 after the Hockey Centre said it would ruin its master plan and give rise to a possible compensation claim.
The Territory Plan has accepted that, suggesting a widening of Mouat Street to take traffic from Ginninderra Drive to Northbourne Avenue.
Protection group spokesmen Graham Horn and Ross Coldrey said it would mean that Mouat Street a residential area would take traffic from five thoroughfares: Ginninderra Drive, Ellenborough Street (from Kaleen), the Barton Highway, Antill Street (from the north-west suburbs) and the Federal Highway. The group said Ginninderra Drive should be extended with restricted access to Mouat Street, saying the extension of Ginninderra Drive would only affect a proposed car park for the Hockey Centre. Mouat Street currently gives access to inner north streets for peak-hour through traffic which they were not designed for. Humps, roundabouts and soil mounds were needed in North Canberra because the old design did not have loops and cul-de-sacs. But these still would not prevent the extra noise from a widened Mouat Street, it said.
The president of the ACT Tennis Association and deputy chair of the National Sports Centre, Roy Smalley, said widening Mouat Street was a better option.
“An extension of Ginninderra Drive would cut across the sports heartland of Canberra,” he said. “We, the netballers, Yowani Golf Club and the hockey people are all against it. The parliamentary committee was against it.”
The president of the Hockey Centre, Graham Carter, said his centre wanted to put a car park between it and the tennis centre where Ginninderra Drive would go. If the car park did not go there, it would have to take up other hockey space.