Why roads are not suitable for mass transportation

The now departed Napthine government was hell-bent on spending up to $16b on the "East West link" tollway tunnel project, claiming that it would "be the transport infrastructure that Melbourne needs".  They included fanciful claims including that the new tunnel would:

• Reduce commute times by 20 minutes
• Reduce congestion on Hoddle Street

Both claims are patently false.  The Napthine government lost he election held on 29 November and the incoming Premier, Daniel Andrews, has pledged to stop the East West Link road project  proceeding.

Similar claims were made by Jeff Kennet back in the 90s when he claimed the City Link road project, constructed between 1996 and 2000 would "will solve Melbourne's traffic problems". Clearly, it has not.

However, there is another good reason why roads cannot provide a suitable mass transport system for a city such as Melbourne - every driver is a single point of failure.

Nearly every day there is a crash which can close or seriously disrupt traffic on a route.

Six cars and a truck were involved in two crashes on the West Gate Bridge. Photo: Seven News

For example,a crash closed the West Gate Bridge on Tuesday 2 December. Such crashes and closures are now a daily occurrence.

By comparison, trains carry up to 800 passengers with a single driver - and don't have to contend with road intersections and "lane changes".

We need some real political leadership to build more train lines and revise the train network for Melbourne - given that no new suburban rail lines have been built since the Glen Waverley line in 1932.

A dedicated safe bicycle path network should be included too.

Links

• Crash closes West Gate Bridge lanes, The Age  
• West Gate Freeway crash causes delays, The Age 22/11/14
• CityLink, Wikipedia
• East West Link, Melbourne, Wikipedia

2014 Victorian state election priority issues

Here is my list of priority issues for the 2014 Victorian state election

Transport

• The East West Link tunnel road project should not proceed.
• Public transport network plans for 2014-2020
• Funds allocated to building a safe and comprehensive cycling network segregated from cars - 
• Cycling network plans for 2014-2020 - aiming to provide a connected safe bike route to within 5km of every Melbourne resident.

Environment

• Logging in Victoria's native forests should cease.
• The Great Forest National Park to be proclaimed.
• A complete overhaul of our train network - and new lines built to the airport, Rowville and Doncaster

Education

• State secondary school system needs more resources and funds.

Housing

• 7 star efficiency rating for buildings - commercial and residences

Energy

• Energy plan to increase renewable energy production to 80% of total demand by 2020, including investment is solar and wind power and local energy storage capacity

Napthine Government plans $8b underground carpark

Denis Napthine, Michael O'Brien and the Liberal government have just made a disastrous and very expensive mistake.

They announced that their priority "transport" project for Melbourne was to spend $8b digging a tunnel to connect the Eastern Freeway with the Tullamarine Freeway.

After 80 years for constructing hundreds of kilometres of high volume roads (freeways and tollways) across Victoria and into Melbourne, we still have chronic congestion.

During this period:

• no new passenger railway lines have been constructed in Melbourne since the Glen Waverley line was built in 1930.  
• Melbourne has grown from a city of 1 million to nearly 5 million in 2013.

Denis Napthine (Premier), Michael O'Brien (Treasurer) and Terry Mulder (Transport Minister) don't seem to realise that cars and roads cannot provided a workable mass transport system.  A visit to Los Angeles proves this beyond doubt.  They are now building a metro rail network in that big city.

Simple mathematics eludes our politicians:

• One train of 8 carriages can carry 1000 people.  A train line can move 50,000 people an hour.
• One freeway/tollway lane can move 2,500 people an hour.
• Four freeway/tollway lanes can move 10,000 people an hour.
• One train line moves the same number of people as twenty freeway lanes

The RACV have gleefully announced that the Napthine Government is "investing in critical transport infrastructure".  It is clear that their lobbying has been very effective, as always.

Michael O'Brien said "this is nation-building infrastructure - just look at CityLink".  O'Brien obviously hasn't looked at the stationary cars and trucks on City Link trying to get through the Burnley Tunnel, or the traffic jams on every major "freeway/tollway" the commuters try to use to get to Melbourne.

Denis Napthine has challenged the Federal Labor government to provide funds for this project, even though there is no business case for it.  Tony Abbot has announced he will commit $1.5b to the project if he becomes prime minister.

Foolish politics politics is condemning Melbourne to ongoing chronic traffic congestion and providing people with no viable transport alternative.

These people also don't seem to understand that the destination of over 90% of the people driving on the Eastern Freeway is inner Melbourne so they won't benefit from a tunnel link to the Tullamarine Freeway/Tollway.

If this "East-West tunnel" is built it too will block up with cars and become the world's most expensive underground car park.

The Melbourne Metro Rail Tunnel is a rail project that formed out of recommendations in the Eddington Report.  The Napthine Government has only funded ongoing "planning" for this.  The Federal Labor Government has allocated $3 billion to this project, contingent on the Napthine Government also allocating $3 billion, which they have refused to do.  Tony Abbott has also ruled out providing funding for the rail project.

However, I am not convinced that the Melbourne Metro Rail Tunnel - that would provide an underground rail line from Foostcray to Caulfield - is the best rail option for Melbourne.  The authors of the Eddington Report, including Peter Newman, claim this project is "required to increase capacity in the existing rail network to allow new suburban rail lines to be built".  But they did not do an holistic study of Melbourne's rail network - their brief was only to assess "east west transport needs".

Personally, I think we need, in priority order the:

1. Rowville line, also connecting Monash University.  Shuttle service to the Dandenong line with a people interchange
2. Doncaster line, connecting near Clifton Hill
3. Melbourne Airport line, connecting Melbourne Airport to Southern Cross station
4. Melbourne outer loop underground - a circle line connecting South Melbourne, South Yarra, Richmond, Fitzroy, Carlton, Melbourne University, Docklands and Southern Cross.

Unfortunately, all we will get for the coming decades are more clogged roads that will become underground car parks.

Golding, The Age

Links

• Rail or road? Napthine takes us down the wrong route, The Age
• Tunnel won't fix traffic woes, The Age 

Melbourne's train meltdown

Melbourne suffered a extreme outage today.  Nearly every train line was affected when a train's pentagraph (the bit that connects to the overhead wires) got snagged and brought down the line, causing a power outage that basically shut down Southern Cross station, then the entire rail network.

Dozens of trains were cancelled on all lines for over 2 hours.  Over 400,000 commuters were delayed on their way to work and across the rail network.  The cost to the economy has been estimated at $12 million dollars.

Martin Pakula, the state transport minister, apologised to the public, as did Metro, the new private operator of the system.

The root cause appears to be a chronic lack of investment in basic maintenance, including:

• many old trains
• wooden sleepers still abound, many of which are decades old
• signals and associated cable conduits
• the power wire system

There is obviously also no redundancy in the power system - what we saw today was a single point of failure.

The funding allocated to maintenance of Melbourne's rail system is a tiny proportion of that allocated to roads, yet every day in Melbourne the rail system moves more people to and from the CBD.  

As I have mentioned previously, no new suburban train line has been built in Melbourne since the Glen Waverley line in 1930.  Since that time Melbourne's population has increased from 1 million to over 4 million.

The privatised system is clearly a failure.  The government blames the operator (Metro) for "delivering poor service" and Metro (and previously Connex) blames the government for not investing enough in upgrading rail infrastructure.  Nobody is actually accountable any more, which is just not good enough.

As compensation, the Metro operators and the State Goverment will let people travel for free on Friday and share the $1m loss of revenue.

Here is what we need to do:

• Allocate $2b per annum to upgrade existing rail infrastructure
• Build new rail lines to suburbs that have no rail, including the Rowville and Doncaster lines.
• Plan a metro circle system for inner Melbourne that connects Parkville, Brunswick, Fitzroy, Richmond, South Yarra, South Melbourne and North Melbourne.
• Return the system to public management with clear accountability for service delivery.
• Spend no more money on the Myki card - and ditch it doesn't work.  The system really only benefits private operators - for whom it has been designed to provide revenue.  It is too complicated and the stupid "touch off" requirement impedes users greatly.
• Stop building ridiculous "roads to nowhere" projects such as Westlink and the Frankston Bypass

The total cost of $15m would have been much better spent on prevention and proper maintenance.

External links

• Shame Metro, shame, The Age
• Frustrated commuters to travel 'free' after Metro rail meltdown, The Age
• Rail chaos imperils Brumby, The Age
• Stranded by a wire, The Age
• Call to invest in rail powerlines, The Age
  

We need funding and improved infrastructure for public transport

After several decades of neglect, Melbourne's public transport system is now running at capacity and old infrastructure is failing. Some examples of this are:

• Wooden sleepers still abound - many over 60 years old
• Trains fail when it is "too wet" and "too hot"
• The old Hitachi trains are clapped out and have very high failure rates
• No new suburban railway lines have been built since the Glen Waverley line in 1930
• The signal system is ancient - and apparently so arcane hardly anyone knows how to maintain or replace it
• No double decker trains are in use - despite one being trialled for a couple of years on the Belgrave line - apparently successfully. I caught it and it worked fine.
• Trains don't have enough route information in them. The tiny maps are hard to locate, difficult to read, and only coloured according to zones (not lines).
• The maps of tram routes are almost impossible to decipher. They are all in yellow and the numbers that designate routes are very small and hard to find.

So what have successive governments done?

Both Labor and Liberal governments have taken a "spend as little as possible" approach, regarding public transport as a burden to provide and adminster.

Jeff Kennett privatised it, with glowing promises of improvements and greater efficiency. None resulted, and the various operators morphed into single operators for train, tram and bus.

The Bracks (then Brumby) government did not reverse the privatisation, despite its obvious failure to deliver benefits. The Brumby government renewed the licences of operators, then this year change the companies that "operate" both the tram and train networks.

This is just changing the lipstick on the pig. Now millions will be spent on rebranding and new uniforms. This money would be better spent in improving and renewing infrastructure.

The train operator is even called "Metro", so now apparently we have a "metro" in name only - when the city really needs a decent new metro and more outer suburban lines.

We have a new behemoth Southern Cross Station, which also does nothing to improve train services.

The 8 billion dollar tunnel project to connect Footscray with Caulfield has gone very quiet; presumably it will have a slow and quiet death. Its benefits are dubious in any case, and it is not a metro project, despite government spin suggesting that it is. Heavy underground rail is not a metro.

The Liberal opposition criticises the Brumby government but refuses to commit to any increased expenditure as well. If the Brumby government gets turfed out - as they may - the Liberals would continue on in the same vein.

Please consider writing to your local MP on this issue. It seems they really don't care. It is up to us to make them care, and the city of Melbourne and its inhabitants (including car drivers) will all benefit if they do improve public transport.

External links

• Rail woes mount for Metro, The Age, 1 December 2009

Solving transport challenges rather than just building roads

I have been perplexed by successive Victorian governments fixation on building roads and freeways and not providing more rail transport. In this regard, the Brumby Labor government is no different from its predecessors.

It seems to me that that both the government and Vicroads have made incorrect assumptions that cars, trucks, roads and freeways will meet most of our transport needs now and for the future.

I wonder if they listen to the radio reports every morning of the congestion and delays on all freeways as increasing numbers of commuters try and get to work along "freeways" blocked with congestion by single occupant cars whose drivers obviously don't believe they have adequate public transport options available to them. 30-minute delays over the last 10 to 15 kilometres are common in the mornings, and very slow speed due to congestion are now chronic over similar distances in the afternoon and early evening.

The government must be aware of this very real problem, yet their answer seems to be "we need more freeways, tunnels and links" - as the Brumby governments terms of reference seem to suggest for the Eddington report - which seems to be focusing on reasons why building an east-west tunnel link between the Eastern and Tullamarine freeways should proceed.

I have just read recent reported comments by Transport Minister Lynn Kosky in this article, including:

"We are working to find ways to meet increasing demand for public transport services," Ms Kosky said.

The Government had just ordered 18 new six-carriage trains that would carry 14,500 more people during peak times — "equivalent to more than 12,000 cars and more than six freeway lanes of capacity".

So they do know that trains are much more efficient than cars for mass transit. They would also know that car transport produces around 8 times more carbon emissions (using dwindling oil reserves) compared with urban rail transport.

However, just buying more trains and trams will not solve the problem for those who don't have easy access to local rail tranport, as this map below illustrates.

Melbourne railways map
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Melbourne_railways_map.gif

We don't have enough train lines. No new heavy rail lines to the suburbs have been built in Melbourne since the Glen Waverly line was completed in 1930, yet there has been massive population growth in south eastern, northern and western suburbs. Whole new suburbs and regions exist with no access to rail transport. No new significant rail lines are planned in Melbourne.

Those that have been planned, and even committed to in the past, such as the Doncaster and Rowville lines, are apparently on hold or shelved. Recent plans to extend the Epping Line to the new sustainable suburb of Aurora have not been delivered.

During this time, freeway constructions include:

• Eastern freeway (and extension to Springvale Road, following by an extension through to Ringwood and Eastlink)
• The South eastern freeway - since widened and connected to (and incorporated with) the Monash freeway
  
• Monash freeway (and extensions/bypasses to the Princes Highway now past Pakenham)
• The Western Ring Road
• Eastlink (about to open) connecting Ringwood with Frankston
• The Mornington Peninsula freeway (in two sections)
  
• The Western freeway
• The Calder freeway
• The Tullamarine freeway
• The Princes freeway to Geelong
  
• Citylink connecting the Tullamarine, Monash and West Gate freeway via bridges and two tunnels.

Several interchanges have also been upgraded at great cost. This list is not comprehensive, but it does make clear that activity and funding for roads and freeways has greatly exceeded that for rail over the last seventy years.

Over recent times the government has chosen to spend money on large projects such as the Southern Cross station upgrade, on ticketing systems that don't work properly, and on employing ticket inspectors, none of which have actually provided better, more frequented integrated public transport. One has to question these priorities.

Here are my suggestions for getting urban transport solutions back on track:

• Set up an new transport authority to evaluate, promote and implement the best transport solutions for sustainability and mass urban transit. This authority should include proper public consultation during their strategy development and planning processes.
  
• Ensure funding for public transport is equivalent to or greater than that for roads.
• Mandate provision of rail or light rail transport and cycle paths with all future freeway road constructions
• Include carbon emission costing for all transport related infrastructure expenditure.
• Keep public transport operation or management public. Public ownership and government accountability for service delivery are essential to ensure that public transport is integrated and efficient, rather than just run for "profit" under secret contracts with public subsidies.
• Build a rail link to Melbourne airport. Thousands of taxies carry travellers to and from Melbourne every day.
• Investigate options for an inner urban metro system
• Resurrect and build stalled rail projects such as the Epping line extensions to South Morang and Aurora, the Rowville and Doncaster lines and the Alamein line extension to service Chadstone.
• Integrate cycle paths with train networks by mandating construction of cycle paths along railway easements and provide for carriage of bicycles on trains.
• Our politicians should use some of their travel allowance to visit Los Angeles to see how badly an extensive freeway system much bigger than Melbourne's cater to mass transit needs
  

Like most of the challenges that confront us in the 21st century, it seems the solutions are already available for moving towards sustainable living, but the political will to embrace them is lacking.

As oil reserves diminish our very expensive freeway system could at least end up providing fast and efficient bicycle transport!

Links

• List of proposed Melbourne rail extensions Wikipedia
  
• Getting worse, that's what commuters think of system The Age
  
• 18 more trains ordered for metropolitan rail system Media release, Lynn Kosky
  

Previous posts on transport

• Sustainable transport solutions are what we need
  
• A subway system for Melbourne and less secretive planning
  
  

Sustainable transport solutions are what we need

As I live in and travel about Melbourne, Australia, I ponder over our fixation on building, expanding and connecting more roads and freeways.

Melbourne traffic is grinding to a halt both on and off the freeways for much of the working day in many areas. Every freeway suffers big traffic jams as many use them to commute to work in their own cars, often as the single occupant.

It was apparent on my first visit to Los Angeles in the 1989 that a freeway system cannot function as an effective urban mass transit system. "Tailbacks" of waiting cars form, accidents happen, and tonnes of greenhouse gases are emitted by the vehicles using them.

Yet here in Melbourne in 2007, Eastlink is moving towards completion, another two lanes are being added to the Monash freeway, the Westgate bridge is groaning under the weight of vehicles and often gridlocked, and the state government has flagged a likely project to build a very expensive tunnel ($8b) to connect the Eastern and Tullamarine freeways - despite the fact that most motorists don't want to travel between the two - they just want to get in and out of the city.

On the Monash freeway a small section of new sound barriers cost $8m, which is more than state's entire budget for cycle paths.

The entire Eastlink project is costing about $6b, but you cannot find out the exact figure as the project is being done as a "Public Private Partnership" (PPP) so the the financials are kept secret.

No new train lines have been built since the Glen Waverley line in 1937.

We need viable low carbon emission transport options such as trains and cycle paths. At this point, there is no real government action on either.

Links

• Tunnel discussions an electoral black spot, theage.com.au