Vic State Government and the Tunnel

[think positive]

Whatever they do, I hope they do it properly first time. Don't think a day goes by that they are not working on/changing something about the ring road.

And the Westgate bridge seriously needs back up, either a tunnel, or another bridge. My brother in law used to work full time maintaining the bridge, they scrapped the department, and he went back as a subby doing the repairs, maintenance, and it gradually dwindled. Now with an extra lane, just how much extra load is it carrying?

WPT your so right about a few land holders making a killing (don't have a problem with that, they had a good forward view, maybe there should have been a limit to how much they could buy, I'm on one of those blocks!) and the municipalities not having the roads to cater. When I did the daily trip to port Melbourne 30 years ago, the toll was 60 cents, and it never jammed up for peak hour. Now thanks to the bottle neck, I never leave home before 9 if making the trip, or leave at 7, no later. It can take 30 min to get from hoppers crossing to the first altona exit in the morning, it's less than 10 in ideal conditions. My agent told me yesterday she bought one of the few remaining blocks here, on the creek (don't know why people pay the money, it's not much of a view!) she paid 440k for a small block. That's just madness.
And the high density unit population is only adding to it. Point cook is an absolute nightmare. Avoid it like the plague, unless it's the middle of the day.

Should not be able to sell of land in these quantities for building unless you have a road system in place. One that can cope with the traffic. Yesterday I drove further down point cook road than I have in years, and I can't believe it, virtually all the way down to the RAAF base is new housing development. And. It's still one lane each way for too much of the main road. It needs to be double, with a plantation in the middle. Some of its been done but it just bottle necks.

I lived over in Cheltenham for a while, and I hated the traffic, back then there was only one set of lights in the whole of altona.

[Pies4shaw]

Spent an entertaining little time last night trying to work out from the vague, indicative route diagram published by the State Government whether the proposed train route from Arden to Parkville stations will go merely near, rather than through, under or around my house. It looks to me like it's going to pass under land within about a block of me (it starts to the west on an alignment roughly parallel with Queensberry St and then seems to do a sort of dog-leg north-ish to get around to somewhere near the haymarket roundabout (Flemington Rd/Grattan St/Royal Parade sort of spot) which is, I assume, the logical (cheap) place to put the Parkville station. These sorts of unhelpful diagrams tell you that you can probably be confident that the design engineers live in Balwyn - they'd likely feel the need to be a little more precise with their drawings if the train was going to pass under their street.

Since North Melbourne's now a heavily populated residential area (lots of tall apartment blocks have been - and are continuing to be - built), they've probably worried quite a few people (or will, when the penny drops). Of course, I wouldn't be opposed to the project merely because they want to build it under my house - but it would be nice to know.

[HAL]

Of course you do?

[Tannin]

Two points, Stui:

(1) The cheapest and by far the most effective way to improve our traffic problems is to get as many cars as possible parked at home. This is what public transport does best: it takes cars off the roads. Every 1.5 extra passengers on a train is a car not clogging up the road you want to drive on. That's better than an extra lane on Bridge Road any day of the week. There is nothing too much wrong with our road system, it's just got way too many cars trying to fit into not enough road. Sure, we all like road improvements, but we need to target our limited transport dollar to the things that will do the most good: i.e., to restoring the road/rail balance so that our trains run better and our roads aren't so overcrowded.

(2) Using the road network to send freight from Sydney to Dandenong is insane. Yup, we do it all the time, but the cost is vastly, vastly higher than doing it the sensible way, which is to do all the long-haul stuff by rail and use trucks for local pickup and delivery. Right now, the various levels of government spend a fortune subsidising road freight (largely via various indirect payments and counter-productive cost externalities) and go out of their way to cripple rail. We are still stuck in the 1950s when it cost a lot of time and money to transfer freight from one vehicle to another.

Those days are long, long gone: containerisation and computerisation and modern management has wiped them down to almost nothing, but we still plan our long-haul land transport as if it was 1952 and the only way to tranship a load is to pay some sweaty blokes in blue singlets to lug hessian sacks around on their backs. In reality, freight transhipment is a minor, routine, everyday task that costs very little - as demonstrated by the incredible productivity of modern import-export operations, where each parcel is tracked by bar code through the whole complicated web of aeroplane, distribution centre, medium-haul B-double, regional freight exchange, and local delivery truck, and it costs sweet bugger-all 'coz they are good at it.

[stui magpie]

^

Seriously?

Mate I caught public transport for 20+ years when I worked in the city. Now I work in the Eastern suburbs and live in the northern. 30km takes between 45 minutes to an hour.

How exactly is public transport going to fix that? Put more buses on the road to carry those people and take all the cars out of there way, with all the stopping to pick people up it won't be any faster. I know someone who got a daily bus from Doreen to Nunawading and back for work. Life's too short to spend that much time commuting every day.

Linking the Eastern to the ring road is basic fricken common sense. If they want to get really smart, put a light rail down the middle of it but don't tell me that public transport is the cure. Melbourne is just too spread out and the roads are £$%$ed.

[Tannin]

Yes of course I'm serious. There are indeed lots of suburb to suburb trips and many of these are not sensibly replacable by public transport given our low population density. However, a great many others are, and this proportion will only increase over time as:

(a) Melbourne's population density increases with more and more flats, units, and high-rise blocks. (I'm not saying these things are good, just that they are happening and will keep on happening due to both market forces and deliberate state and local government planning law changes.)

(b) The presence of good public transport itself has a very powerful effect on land use: once you build a rail line, a tram route, or even put in a decent bus schedule, homes and businesses tend to aggregate around that transport facility. You can see this effect for yourself by looking at the parts of Melbourne (or any city) best served by public transport, and noting that these are the very places which have the highest use density (businesses, offices, homes, and so on).

Businesses like to be in the city because the transport goes there. The transport goes there because that's where the business is. Put in transport somewhere else and the business follows. (Obviously, you do it first with places that already have pent-up demand. I don't know Melbourne well enough anymore to be able to say what these places are - the city has changed a lot since I lived there - but it might be good to look at places like Frankston and Dandenong.)

(PS: no argument, however, about linking the Eastern and the Ring Road. That's a no-brainer, and I'm sure it will get done before too long.)

[stui magpie]

The improvement they need to make to the public transport is in the growth zones in the north. (north, north east, north west, it''s all north of the city)

The growth in suburbs is years ahead of the public transport and that needs to be fixed, stat. But the trains work on a spoke system, carting people from the outer ring to the CBD hub. Simple but effective, but it doesn't do anything for the circuitous route around the outer burbs. Cars do that and we need better road connections.

[Tannin]

Yep. Your hero Henry Bolte knackered the public transport system in the 1960s and it has never recovered. What we need now (aside from a major upgrade to the existing spoke system) is to make a start on joining up the spokes (just as the ring road attempts to do with the road system).

On first sight, you'd think that the public transport cross-links would cost a heap and not carry many people, but when you look at some actual examples, this turns out not to be the case. Look at the north-south tram routes in the south-east: none of these go to the city, they all cross the spokes, but the Bourke Road and Glenferrie Road routes get heaps of custom, and the old Chapel Street route used to also before that road became hopelessly clogged up with cars all day.