Ms O’CONNOR – As the member for Hobart and a representative of this highly congested city, I want to express to you the frustrations of the community that I represent about the lack of investment and focus on passenger and pedestrian transport in and around Hobart.
I’m sure you’ve noticed, minister, congestion is actually getting worse on Davey and Macquarie streets each day. It’s very difficult to get anywhere in a timely way. What is your government doing to help the people of Hobart to have a livable system?
CHAIR – And those who have to come here.
Ms O’CONNOR – And those who have to come here. It’s now becoming clear that Hobart’s traffic and transport needs are utterly deprioritised by this government. That’s the only conclusion you can draw.
Mr VINCENT – Yes, we certainly know the funnel effect of Hobart, of the Huon, Kingston, Derwent Valley, Brighton, and the south-east funnelling in, especially of a morning, and then funnelling out of a night. It does cause problems. My office receives a daily traffic report, morning and night, and the first thing is that it is colour-coded to make it easier for me. When you flick through it, you’re really pleased when you see it all green for each of the major intersections and roads. What it does highlight is the regular congestion on Davey St or at Mornington. It might only be for half an hour, but it sticks in your mind very quickly about some of those congestion points. Being a person who has lived most of their life outside of Hobart and now working in Hobart, it is paramount in my mind, the complications now. Some of the reports I’ve seen on the greater Hobart solution – which I will talk a little bit about in a moment – are quite fascinating because although the Brooker Highway is a certain width – and the Tasman Bridge is there, which we know is under pressure with the amount of traffic moving on it – it is very difficult to keep understanding the growth of Hobart that’s expected over the next 10 to 15 years and working within the corridors that we have. We have limited potential. It is becoming more difficult for us to cope with the present situation. We need to clear our minds and think of a different way of going with it.
Ms O’CONNOR – Possibly because of previous decisions not to invest in some traffic‑calming or alternatives to getting in the car to get from one side to the city to the next.
Mr VINCENT – Yes. Especially in Tasmania, we like the convenience of our cars.
CHAIR – This line item is about passenger transport, so, try and bring us back to that.
Ms O’CONNOR – Yes, but it is connected.
Mr VINCENT – We talked before about the work being done on the northern corridor and what that may mean and the different modes that have been looked at and will come out in that strategic plan about the thought pattern around moving people in and out of that area. Those corridors are being talked about to go down towards Kingborough, as well as to the eastern shore. Certainly, the deputy secretary has some thoughts on the difficulty of that which she will talk about in a moment. We have to look at how effective it will be. The new CEO coming in, just after Christmas, I think –
Ms O’CONNOR – The CEO of?
Mr VINCENT – Metro. She certainly has a lot of experience in moving people, and her fresh thinking, I’m hoping, will be an added value to how we move people around on buses and make Metro more effective in what they do. Certainly, the work on the Southern Outlet on moving people through and the eventual ability to have a T3 lane there – that is for vehicles with three or more people, plus buses and taxis using a dedicated lane. We’ve already seen positive comments from people through the top of Davey Street – through the section that has been done already – when it becomes a full T3, the flow of traffic will assist in what is a congested area now.
Ms O’CONNOR – Sorry to interrupt, minister. Maybe it will. What’s actually happening here is that the road is intended to be widened at the outlet, but it still pinches into the bottleneck going down Macquarie Street. It’s still a pinch point there that has not been dealt with.
Mr VINCENT – We are dealing with the pinch point there. We’ve seen the flow, but traffic continues to increase. The way we look at our density, which we have talked about a fair bit before, will work. I think everybody has a full understanding that we have to use our bus network a lot differently to now. The river ferries are certainly being looked at. The river ferries are an interesting discussion for moving people because we’ve never really planned to do that properly. There are issues with the Bellerive businesses complaining that car parking has been taken up. The one at Sandy Bay, the councils haven’t decided on a site there. Lindisfarne has a site and there are ongoing discussions about Wilkinsons Point. There is a growing amount of people using the ferry system, but it does highlight our mentality as Tasmanian public to be willing to walk to a place to catch a bus or a ferry to get to where we have to go.
It’s quite interesting when you talk about putting the ferries into a location at the wharf or the port structure here on where you bring them in so that it is a very easy walk for people to move and out of the city. It is also interesting about how you have that connectivity between the waterfront and the main shopping area, let’s say the mall, as a destination of how those people will move, and the footpath and the traffic light flow through there to get people to and from work as well. So, there is a lot of work being done on that thought pattern –
Ms O’CONNOR – It’s being done in a sort of ad hoc and casual way –
CHAIR – Unplanned, as he said.
Ms O’CONNOR – Unplanned, I think. Yes. And for a really long time.
Mr VINCENT – A lot of those pinch points have come around from probably lack of enough planning in the past, but there is a fair bit of work being done. I will ask the deputy secretary to explain some of that in more detail and some of the little things that we’re finding in that discussion, please.
Ms O’CONNOR – I’m happy to have sort of an overview, because we’ve only got another 50 minutes in this committee and there’s a few outputs to get through.
Ms HEYDON – Yes. I don’t think it’s a surprise that we perhaps don’t have the PT share that you would expect for a city and an area that we have. What we have been looking at – and appreciate that perhaps there hasn’t been sort of some clear plans out there – we have been challenged with bringing that together. Part of what we’ve been doing with the rapid bus is not just looking at rapid bus but it as a network, as part of what the overall greater Hobart public transport network needs to be and how that integrates with ferries, with sort of the traditional bus routes, and with active transport. So, that is actually underway.
That’s one of the foundational pieces; having that rapid bus network with higher frequency and higher reliability, and then allowing for the design of other bus services that also need to have that broader connection – maybe not as fast, but they’ve got to have that range to be able to capture more people – and then having better integration with all of those with both the ferries and active transport.
Ms O’CONNOR – Thank you. It still sounds like a fair bit is still in the planning stage.
I just close off this line of questioning, minister. You’ve acknowledged that Hobart’s transport system is compressed. Do you agree that plonking a stadium at Macquarie Point – at a pinch point, I might say, where the highway comes into the city – is only going to exacerbate the problems that the city is already facing, which are still being dealt with in a largely planning phase? You can acknowledge, can you not, that the impact of the stadium on existing congestion and profound traffic issues will be significant.
Mr VINCENT – It’s significant most of the use of the stadium would be planned to be at a time outside of a lot of the times when our peaks are already there. It’s been acknowledged that there is a lot of work to do on planning the flow of people, and that a lot of work has already been done on that – whether it’s on footpath, or whether it’s by bus or by transit.
Ms O’CONNOR – Can I just let you know there that the Treasurer the other day, when we were asking him about this associated infrastructure, basically sort of casually waved off the need for investment in better pedestrian infrastructure, when we were trying to get to the bottom of costs?
CHAIR – Everything’s tickety‑boo, he said.
Ms O’CONNOR – All tickety‑boo, don’t need to do any more work on pedestrian –
Mr VINCENT – ‘Tickety‑boo’? Is that one of the new terms I have to learn in political language? ‘Tickety‑boo’?
CHAIR – That’s what he was suggesting, though. That’s true.
Ms O’CONNOR – Yes, that is absolutely what he was suggesting – that there may not be the two‑storey car park, and he doesn’t really see the need for extra pedestrian infrastructures –
CHAIR – Significant investment.
Ms O’CONNOR – And Ms Beach from MPDC indicated that their modelling shows that they don’t need the extra significant infrastructure because they’ve worked it all out, and people will pour across the wharf, apparently, out of the stadium, and not end up –
CHAIR – Not fall in the drink.
Ms O’CONNOR – End up in the drink, or on Davey St, which is a busy road.
Mr VINCENT – I won’t get drawn too far into that, but part of the orders there and some of the finer points raised by the TPC that I found interesting, and I just touched on that, with the way the ferries interact – say, with people getting to work – is how we do move pedestrians around. Because if you’re moving, you have to think of the flow of traffic lights and the safety factor of moving them around, and that’s going to become increasingly the same as we are having to look at the increased capacity of people using electric scooters and other bikes and similar sorts of transport, as well as the push bikes. We have to take all of that into account in being an active‑transport city. I don’t have the perfect answers.
Ms O’CONNOR – We’re not an active‑transport city yet.
Mr VINCENT – No, but we are we are taking it into account as we go.
