Ms Anne Marie O'Connor:

Historically, it is a legacy issue around the amount of development and the policies we have in place that facilitate urban generation. We are not talking about self-sustaining rural populations. We are talking about urban generated housing on individual sites where there is no opportunity to use any other form of transport other than the private car for every trip. If the climate targets are to have approximately 50% of trips being made by walking, cycling and public transport, then a settlement pattern so dependent on that form of housing is going to make that difficult. We are just locking in further dependency on energy intensive single cars. There is that point. The other point is that if such high levels of housing going in to locations like that, then they are not going into the more sustainable locations. They are not going in to support the increase in population needed to support things like BusConnects and stronger public transport initiatives. It is twofold in a way. There is the opportunity cost as well as the impacts of that pattern of development itself.