As a follow-up to my post on Melbourne’s transport issues, the Eddington Report has now been released.
As speculated on earlier, there will indeed be a road tunnel, but one with no CBD exits. Furthermore, there’s a massive rail tunnel project as well, linking Footscray in the west to Caulfield in the south-east, providing an alternative to the overcrowded City Loop in the CBD. There’s also a rail link joining Sunshine and Werribee. Total cost - in the order of $18 billion. Oh, and Eddington describes congestion charging for Melbourne as inevitable.
As my friend and urban planner Russ notes, there’s something in there to annoy just about everyone. For instance, Eddington’s view is that land use change, and public transport, is unlikely to make much of a dint in CO2 emissions from vehicles. Anyway, there’s a hell of a lot to chew on in here, both for Melbourne residents like myself and those interested in urban planning issues more generally.
Are these like NSW Iemma Government reports on public transport, or is there a remote chance that something will actually be built one day?
Well, it seems the Eddington report has made some big assumptions. Like more road tunnels will somehow ease congestion and free up road traffic - despite all evidence pointed to the contrary (viz Citylink) - and that carbon emission redutions will be achieved by a shift to hybrids (over the next 10 years?). A quick calculation indicates that shifting 500,000 car single occupancy commuter trips of 30km per day to trains would save about 700,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
Yet Eddington says we need more roads, and very expensive tunnel ones at that.
He recommends a train tunnel link that has an above ground service on the same route.
He avoids mentioning stalled rail line projects to existing high density/traffic areas (South Morang, Monash/Rowville, Doncaster, Melbourne Airport) and proposes a new western suburbs rail link where few are living.
No tunnel exits in Brunswick and Carlton appear to be a political fix to take the heat out of inner city electorates for Labor.
I guess this is what you get when you set crappy terms of reference for this type of study (e.g. east west link, rather than “Melbourne’s transport needs”) and conduct it in secrecy with submissions from less than 0.01% of Melbourne’s population.
One wonders if they new the answer before they asked the question.
After $100b expenditure on roads over 70 years it is time for heavy investment in public transport - mainly rail - not more roads.
This report from today’s Age reveals a big problem with the plan:
It’s obvious from that all the benefits are in the rail components of the plan - the road components actually result in costs great enough to wipe those benefits out, leaving the plan on a break even basis.
With a bit of the high school algebra you kinda dozed off to, it’s easy to work out that the only way to get benefits greater than cost for the road is if you can bring the road projects in at negative cost - i.e. if you can get someone to pay for the privilege of building the roads and that person pays drivers an incentive to use those roads - negative tolling in other words.
Another world-first approach to transport policy, brought to you by the state of Victoria, home of metcard and myki. Makes a boy proud, it does.
PeterC: For one thing, public transport’s emissions benefits are not as great as people might assume, particularly when the trains and trams are run on brown coal and the buses run on diesel. Peak hour, sure. The 9:30 pm Sunday bus with 1 person on it, not so much.
As for Doncaster and airport rail projects, the argument is that express bus lanes on Alexandra Parade and Flemington Road would achieve the same result for a tiny fraction of the cost.
And the point of the rail tunnel is to allow more trains to run in the system. If you read the detail, there is a quite detailed argument as to why Paul Mees is wrong when he claims that the system can easily cope with more trains as-is.
As to your point about road building always being bad, why wouldn’t the same argument apply to public transport? If we build more train capacity, it’ll only get used…
Gummo: that’s an interesting point; I’ll look into it more closely.
Yes, I know that is the argument but I don’t agree. I have caught the bus along the Eastern freeway - it is vastly inferior to a train. It is dangerous - travelling at high speed down the emergency lane is risky - all it takes is one motorist to pull across suddenly to use the lane at the wrong time and whammo. The bus then gets caught up in city traffic and greatly delayed for the last few km. There isn’t enough room to read a paper while seated. The stop start driving and jerkiness is quite unpleasant too. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for governments to ignore amenity and say “we will give them buses, they are just as good”.
Ditto for the Melbourne airport rail link. Thousands of taxis shuttling backwards and forwards with 1-2 people in them every day. Its a farce. And I have caught that bus too - it is not nearly as good as a train either.
Its a giant cop out. Buses are nowhere near as good as dedicated rail lines.
Eddington doesn’t even go into emissions profiles for modal transport that I can see. This should surely be a starting point? He says “its a concern” but that “transition to hybrids will address it”. Huh? This transition will take 10+ years, we don’t even make hybrids or significant quantities of electric cars here yet; but that’s another story.
Our dirty coal power sources for trains and trams can be transitioned to renewable energ sources, but our existing thirsty petrol engines in cars cannot.
I don’t think we need a whole lot more trains running from Footscray to Caulfield. What we need is more train service to populous suburbs that don’t have them and that have grown over the last 20-30 years in particular.
We are faced with a massive 50 year+ imvestment in roads of all shapes and sizes (which are approaching gridlock) and virtually no investment in rail. This needs to be turned around, following the example of many other cities around the world such as San Francisco (the BART), Stuttgart (an underground U bahn and heavier rail S bahn), Paris with the RER (heavy rail) and Metro (light rail, mostly in tunnels), and even Bordeaux where they learned from us how bad it is to mix trams/light rail with traffic, Vancouver. They have even built a rail service to near LAX!
What about housing density in inner suburbs?
Everyone knows Melbourne’s one of the sprawliest cities around, and higher density living would help lower both car and PT use — in addition to deflating house prices and helping poorer people live closer to the CBD. According to wiki, gasoline use in NY is near the 1920 US national average. Time to disregard Geoffrey, Magda and Dave, and being transforming inner areas to ~6 or 7 storeys.
High time.
Road tunnel -> PPP initiative -> tolls -> everyone avoids the toll road.
Out of the question: you’d have to face the wrath of a demonstrating Geoffrey Rush and the other stodgy gasbag. ‘Don’t maul our Heritage Sprawl!’
This issue has come up very recently, almost in my backyard.
I agree that the inner suburbs need redevelopment, but it needs to be done thoughtfully. 6-7 can be a bit rude in some places. Something akin to 3-4 stories would increase the population density quite a lot without blocking the damn sun.
Goodbye to the backyard for kids to kick a football around.
And bring on the rabbit warren for all!
It will do wonders for general mental health.
As will a pet cat or dog, joe!
You’re right: gradualism is important, and anything is better than nothing. We’re getting 10 stories of apartments here in Northcote, and it doesn’t bother me at all. Similarly, there are some 3- and 4- story apartments just a wee way back from High Street which don’t interfere with the streetscape at all.
Even allowing two storey developments would be a start. My street has a tin-pot heritage overlay thingo which precludes even a second storey addition if it is visible from the street. A risible 1970’s aesthetic that does not allow for the size of Australia’s growing population (wilfully encouraged by politicians on both sides, of course.)
The EWLNA deserves a close read. Some of the criticism, particularly the early stuff in Saturday’s Age, was quite well covered in the Assessment. There are however a couple of statements in there that are pretty assumption driven - particularly about people’s behaviour and capacity to convert back to PT.
I’m quite assured by the logic underneath each of the smaller recommendations, they should all be adopted (sorry, no train to Doncaster), it’s the big ticket tunnels that require more debate and discussion. Eddington’s central point however is that SOMETHING and something BIG has got to start soon, this requires a revolutionary, big ticket approach.
One particular point of interest was that 70% of container freight from the Port is going to somewhere in melbourne. So there is much less opportunity to shift that to rail than I thought was possible. He does have a partial solution/recommendation, that it should be loaded from ships onto trains to three points around Melbourne, and then onto trucks for further distribution, but I guess the direct economics of this are questionable, and it only makes sense when you consider amenity (cancer rates) for Westies.
Eddington goes on a lot about Footscray and the economic divide between the west and the rest. As a Footscray resident I heartily concur.
This brought joy to my heart.
Ahem, HTML she is broken:
This =
[link]
Yeah helen, that’s one of the key examples of the good stuff in the cheap reccs in the Eddington report. My daily cycle commute would be greatly improved by the copenhagen style improvement to the Arden/Queensberry street link.
Ken Davidson gets more disappointing every year. I used to think he had such insight. This column is another one that indicates he’s losing it: [link]
He clearly hasn’t read the report, since he’s chosen to make a bunch of stuff up about it.
Some good comments on the Eddington Repoert which has all but
ignored Rudd’s plan to put a heavy penalty on carbon emissions.
A simpler rail project would be to connect Sth Yarra Station
via St Kilda Rd/Domain and the RMIT,to Melb Uni thus:
. taking pressure off Richmond, Flinders St, Sthn Cross Stations
. allowing easier access to the above from the west and north
. connecting to the world’s most active tram system
. connecting to the three large work/education centres
. being a lot,lot cheaper than the $9 billion Eddington tunnel
. allowing for possible connection to the Clifton hill line and
eastern suburbs at a later stage
Note that One Train can take 8 kilometres of traffic off the roads;
and freeways through cities in a few short years create more congestion because they induce more motor vehicle trips and lead to further
emissions, pollution, and blockages at off-ramps.
Your comments on the above would be welcome.