There are a lot of eyes on Bendigo as it trials turning its main street into a shared zone, where pedestrians and cars share the thoroughfare. No zebra crossings or traffic lights - just very slow traffic, eye contact between walkers and drivers, and the focus on the livability of the town centre.

But the idea is not really that new. ACT has done it to a degree in Childers Street within ANU, and to a lesser degree where cars parking under Garema Court enter the end of City Walk/Garema Place. When I was a Councillor on the Sunshine Coast, we did the same thing with Ocean Street in Maroochydore.

How much better would it be to use the Bendigo example for Gungahlin's Hibberson Street? Hibberson Street suffers badly from a critical design flaw - Flemington Road funnels all the through traffic for areas east and west through the middle of the town. Maybe someone thought it was a good idea to get traffic into the town centre to give the new businesses a kick along, but if so, it was a terribly short-sighted idea.

So now we have all this traffic going through the shopping area, when it's just trying to get to the other side not the shops.

We have been talking with Ministers, planners and traffic engineers about this problem for the last year. Wer have been saying that they need to redesign the intersection at either end of Hibberson Street to push the through traffic out and around the town centre, leaving Hibberson Street for 'destination traffic' - people who actually want to go to the shopping area.

The solution we are to be given is a set of traffic lights between Woolworths and Big W, at a cost of around $100,000, early next year. We are arguing that this will actually make things worse, because drivers will know they can get through in a reasonable time due to the control of the lights. At the moment during busy periods, cars can be stuck at that crossing for quite a while as steady streams of pedestrians govern the zebra crossing.

This is another example of the car ruling us.

I talked with one senior traffic planner in Roads ACT and I know they are also interested in this pilot. So maybe there is hope of a more enlightened solution for us. But meanwhile $100,000 will have been spent on traffic lights...