Larvatus Prodeo

With the Rudd government’s promise to speed up infrastructure funding, and the impending release of the Victorian Government’s transport statement, there’s been a couple of transport infrastructure plans floating around the media.

The first, splashed on the front pages of the Herald Sun, is a new freeway, is a leak from the Victorian Goverment’s transport plan. It joins the recently built Eastlink tollway in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, to the Mornington Peninsula freeway in Melbourne’s far south-eastern fringes, bypassing the suburbs of Carrum Downs, Frankston and Mount Eliza. The government wants federal money, from infrastructure Australia, for the project to build it without charging tolls. The second, put together by the Cycling Promotion Fund, a consortium of bicycle-related businesses big and small, proposes to spend a similar amount of money over four years building cycling infrastructure across Australia’s big cities, with the goal of “a doubling of cycling trips in capital cities by 2012 and tripling cycling trips by 2029 based on the 2006 census data.”

While it’s perhaps unfair to compare a public submission by what I imagine is a relatively small lobbying organization to a state government-backed inquiry can do, it strikes me that there’s a fundamental weakness in this document, and most proposals for large investments in cycling infrastructure over the years. The result is usually a pat on the head and a dribbling of money for cyclists, with the rivers of money continuing to go to the road builders.

Continue reading ‘Two transport proposals’