Victoria’s $200 billion suburban rail loop (SRL) will be a horribly expensive white elephant that will get in the way of solving housing affordability, and many other things the state needs to do.
The Albanese government should not put in a dollar, and kybosh it, asap.
The suburban underground railway is one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Australian history – much more expensive than Snowy Hydro, 1.0 and 2.0 combined – but was not recommended by any infrastructure bodies and emerged directly from the office of former premier Dan Andrews as a political fix, with no respect for proper process and little care or understanding of transport principles.
New Premier Jacinta Allen, then transport minister, was in on the joke at the time, and has doubled down rather than abandon it, as she should have done when she took over.
It is blatant political pork-barrelling, but won’t even work as that because of the unpopular high-rise buildings that go with it.
What’s planned
The plan is that the SRL will lead to a series of new “CBDs” around the middle suburbs, in line with the government’s separate housing affordability plan to give councils zoning targets to be achieved largely by raising the height limit around train stations from two to three storeys to five to six storeys.
But locals don’t want high-rise buildings in their suburbs and will be chaining themselves to bulldozers and voting out the councillors. Densifying the suburbs is a good idea, and ultimately necessary to some extent, but in the short term community opposition will create delays and uncertainty.
And anyway, how many people want to catch the train from Cheltenham to Box Hill? Or from Doncaster to Fawkner? Not many. It’ll be good for students to get from Box Hill to Monash Uni in Clayton, but that doesn’t justify 90 kilometres of tunnels. They can catch the bus.
What is actually needed to boost housing supply in Victoria, apart from more builders and less CFMEU, is for the train line to Geelong to be electrified and upgraded to a proper commuter service.
Geelong priority
Geelong has become an outer suburb of Melbourne, but the train is still run by V/Line, the country rail operator.
The diesel trains are slow, unreliable and not built for commuting. They have a lot of seats and little standing room, and carry about one-sixth the number of people as a suburban electric train.
The trains from Geelong are also the way people in the new suburbs in Melbourne’s west – like Wyndham Vale and Tarneit – get to work. There’s no other public transport – they have to catch the V/Line train from Geelong – if they can get on it.
The new housing developments around Geelong are mostly near V/Line stations called Marshall and Waurn Ponds, which also has some big shopping malls nearby.
What is obviously needed, and what housing and infrastructure experts are calling for, is that the train line from Melbourne to Waurn Ponds be electrified and turned into a fast, reliable, commuter service running every 10 to 15 minutes during peak periods.
That would not only encourage more houses to be built near the shops at Waurn Ponds, but also allow all the land between Geelong and Melbourne to be developed, from Lara to Werribee. That’s tens of thousands of hectares of mostly empty land, with an airport (Avalon) in the middle of it.
Extract from New Daily
Honestly what a stupid article how does this guy think people in Melbourne are going to get around a city that is already Australia’s largest and will be far bigger in 10 years time? These people are just useless and their ideas to stop the delivery of critical infrastructure are stupid.