THE ACT Government’s 2012 submission to Infrastructure Australia estimates a benefit-cost ratio of 4.78 for investing $276 million in buses, combined with urban infill.

That equates to $1.3 billion in benefits. Spending an extra $338m on light rail would generate only an extra $117m of benefits. Buses will be more cost-effective than trams, over the range of discount rates from 4 per cent to 10 per cent.

Bus rapid transit will allow us to use that $338m to retire some of our $1 billion Mr Fluffy debt, or to invest in high-value projects. $1m would provide transit lanes along Northbourne Avenue. $2m would fix the bottleneck at the Federal Highway end of Flemington Road. $10m would fund 25 walking and cycling projects that will each be more cost-effective than the City Cycle Loop.

Some of the $338m could build cost-effective footpaths to enable more Canberrans to walk to local shops, schools, jobs and transit stops.

Light rail would deliver thousands of passengers every day on to the median of a dangerous 400 metres of road that accounts for 6 per cent of Canberra’s pedestrian crashes. Half of Canberra’s pedestrian deaths occur on roads such as Northbourne Avenue, whose wide medians encourage risky road crossings because pedestrian signals turn red while pedestrians cross the median.

Median rail lines would prevent narrowing the median to allow pedestrians to cross in a single pass.

The business case estimates light rail’s benefit-cost ratio at only 1.2. Light rail’s costs may actually exceed its benefits, if that estimate contains even relatively small errors. For example, Canberra’s 2004 Sustainable Transport Plan projected that bus mode share would increase from 6.7 per cent to 9 per cent, but it only reached 7.9 per cent.

The business case fails to account for the thousands of tonnes of greenhouse emissions that would be caused in building light rail, or for emissions from the implied 38 per cent increase in car commuting trips. It assumes a 10 per cent reduction in journey time, even though tram users would spend more time walking to and from widely spaced tram stops, and would have to factor an extra three minutes into most journeys, to allow for waiting at pedestrian signals to cross to and from the median.

Until the Government publishes the workings behind the business case, we will not know if it was affected by errors like those in the 2011 Walking and Cycling Trunk Infrastructure Report, that underestimated the cost of the City Cycle Loop by 97 per cent, biased its ranking 9 to 1 in favour of projects near employment centres, and invalidated all of its “cost-effectiveness” estimates.

Leon Arundell, Downer

Mr Fluffy owners smell a rat

THE ACT Government went for the Feds’ throats to solve the Mr Fluffy problem.

“Sorry, stiff, whatever, can’t help, we are bigger and tougher than you, but here’s a lazy $1 billion you can borrow to fix it but we want it back in 10 years,” said the Feds.

“Hmmm,” said the ACT Government and its multi-tier “expert” committees. “If we move the goal posts a little this is ‘winner, winner, chicken dinner’,

too bad about the Mr Fluffy home owners’ wants and needs, but they will understand and forgive in a few years.”

Well they won’t, you know. They won’t because the Mr Fluffy owners smell a rat.

Michael Attwell, Dunlop

Tardy thinking towards Cup winners

I BELIEVE those criticising the Melbourne Cup riches going overseas are tardy in their thinking, and perhaps out of the barrier.

The Cup, at over $6 million, is now the third richest race in the world, so it is only reasonable to expect worldwide interest. And if overseas trainers are better at producing faster distance horses, then we should correct the situation by producing more of the Bart Cummings line.

Racing in Canberra often occurs on Cup day and attracts a goodly number of interstate players who add to our local coffers. I’ve never read heavy criticism of the Kentucky Derby entrepreneurs for “foreigners” moving in on their race.

Colliss Parrett, Barton

The unfair energy target rip-off

THERE are few certainties in life other than death and taxes. Death might be coming early for the Australian renewable energy industry if the federal government goes ahead and breaks an election promise it made to keep the current Renewable Energy Target.

Investors have spent over $10 billion on big renewable energy projects such as wind and solar farms under this policy, and now they face being ripped off if the government changes the rules halfway through the scheme and pushes through a cut to the target of almost two thirds.

This would mean a massive cut in the number of wind and solar farms in the future and the loss of thousands of jobs in rural and regional Australia. But it would also crush the viability of those projects already built in good faith, based on a policy that has been supported by all major political parties for the past 13 years.

And as the government’s own analysis showed, any cut to this policy would only drive up power prices for Australians so that a few old coal companies can make more money.

The federal Coalition supported the current Renewable Energy Target when it was passed into law in 2010. And it restated its commitment to that same target in July last year in the lead up to the last election.

Companies don’t expect calm seas and plain sailing, but they do expect a government to keep their word.

Kane Thornton, acting chief executive,

Clean Energy Council