Council has no imagination beyond the ad hoc
Mark Ellis is quite right that the Peninsula needs a comprehensive, integrated planning approach to future housing, transportation andenvironmental needs (Peninsula News edition 438, February 12), as I have pointed out on many occasions.
However, his suggestion that an ART system "could deliver considerable financial, social and environmental benefits" is, perhaps, a little exaggerated.
An ART system is, after all, only a glorified bus lane and, although it might be viable in a high-density urban context, there is little prospect that it would be workable on the Central Coast.
The main feature of an ART network is that its vehicles can carry the same volume of traffic as a light-rail system at a much lower capital cost, but the Peninsula's requirement is not for large-capacity vehicles on fixed routes but for frequent, low-capacity vehicles or for an on-demand, flexible-route service.
Either of these solutions requires a co-ordinated road-vehicle pattern and, as long as we have public authorities patching up roads in accordance with existing demand rather than future needs and transport providers running unsuitable vehicles wherever roads just happen to go, we shall get nowhere towards an efficient and responsive arrangement.
Of course, nobody would dispute that the population pattern and topography of the region make it a bit of a transportation planner's nightmare and, no doubt, present bus operators have done the best they can in the circumstances.
However, anyone who believes that our city council has the imagination to come up with anything more than a cobbled-together set of ad hoc arrangements must be living in a dream world.
Email, 18 Feb 2018
Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy