A new East-West link for Melbourne will be a vital piece of infrastructure and should be the first step in a broader 20 year vision for Melbourne’s infrastructure needs, says VECCI.

VECCI Chief Executive Officer Wayne Kayler-Thomson said that Melbourne’s growth and population pressures were such that we need to envision what Melbourne will look like in 2030 and build our infrastructure needs around this.

“The East West Needs Assessment proposals will make a transformational difference to Melbourne’s current traffic and public transport congestion problems and are timely given that Sydney* and other Australian cities are looking at major infrastructure investments of this nature”, says Mr Kayler-Thomson.

“We are particularly pleased with the fact that Sir Rod Eddington’s proposal gives strong weighting to public transport as well as roads. We agree that efficient roads and public transport are not an either/or proposition – we need both.

“It is important that today’s proposals are seen as the first step in also tackling future as well as current needs, and take into account options for future infrastructure development in the context of any broader infrastructure vision, which might include additional public transport, port and rail freight options as well as the completion of Melbourne’s ring road system.

“The East-West link is of enough strategic and economic significance to be classified as a nation-building project and, as such, Commonwealth funding would be welcome, particularly when Commonwealth funding has been directed to the Western Sydney Orbital Road and the Goodna Bypass in Brisbane.

“We look forward to studying Sir Rod’s proposals in further detail”, says Mr Kayler-Thomson.

* a 2030 vision, Sustainable Sydney 2030 released last week by the City of Sydney

Background

VECCI highlighted the need for a new East-West link for Melbourne at its Victoria Summit in November 2005, linking Doncaster in the east to the Sunshine-Deer Park area in the west, to alleviate current and future traffic problems.

We would contend that the need for such a project is even greater and certainly more urgent than it was in 2005, for the following reasons:

• The completion of EastLink is ahead of schedule – an unintended consequence of this positive development is the potential of extra traffic being funnelled along the Eastern Freeway, exacerbating existing bottlenecks in the inner north. The improved connections to business and industrial areas in outer eastern and southern Melbourne will probably encourage more freight movements as well.
• Container movements through the Port of Melbourne topped 2 million for the first time ever last year, a national record, and recent estimates suggest that container movements could reach 4 million by 2020 and 7 million by 2035. A large proportion of these will be imports and exports travelling to and from Melbourne’s suburban heartland in eastern and south-eastern Melbourne.
• Melbourne is expected to be home to an additional 1 million or more people by 2030, and is currently experiencing its biggest population surge since the 1960s, with the population increasing by over 1,000 per week, more than any other major Australian city. These figures are probably understating the real growth and the attendant pressures on Melbourne’s infrastructure, with many in search of cheaper housing settling just beyond the official boundaries.
• Amenity and liveability are recognised as increasingly important to the economic future of cities – it is noteworthy that Melbourne is no longer considered the World’s Most Liveable City by the Economist’s Intelligence Unit, partly on the grounds of transport congestion.
• Our attractiveness as a tourism destination will at least in part be reliant on easy access to city landmarks, regional centres and our airports.
• The vulnerability caused by relying on one major east-west link, in Melbourne’s case the Monash-CityLink-Westgate corridor, highlighted by an accident in the Burnley Tunnel a year ago.
• Clearing infrastructure bottlenecks is a key prong in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s five-point plan to fight inflation – in the case of inner Melbourne, traffic congestion for both freight and passenger vehicles add to increased freight costs and lost employee time and are often passed onto the consumer.