Category: Letters to the editor

  • PM’s nonsensical logic

    Does Tony Abbott really think Victorians will accept that black is white? That the best way to fund public transport expansion is to not fund it? More specifically, to pull all federal funding out of urban public transport on spurious ideological grounds and pour money into competing road projects instead (“Tony Abbott backs East West…

  • Follow the lead of world’s liveable cities

    Finally, we have confirmation from Infrastructure Australia co-ordinator Michael Deegan of what the community had suspected. The Napthine government has assessed the benefit-cost ratio for its east-west link as just 80¢ in the dollar (The Age, 13/2), in the absence of fanciful “agglomeration benefits”. The wider benefits claimed are the kind that you get by…

  • This government was elected because it promised more

    Why change parties? The Premier is desperate to redeem his government’s record on public transport. So desperate that he starts by citing the Regional Rail Link, an initiative of his Labor predecessors. It was a sad disappointment that the Coalition’s only original contribution to this project was an ineffectual review, which upped the budget but…

  • Premier not listening

    CityLink was supposed to have solved congestion a decade ago. Before that, the extension of the Eastern Freeway to Donvale was supposed to reduce congestion in the eastern suburbs. We’ve had long enough to pronounce a verdict on the evidence. That new roads increase congestion, rather than relieving it, is contrary to naive intuition but…

  • Mandate for Doncaster rail – not the EW motorway

    Build it means kill it When the state Coalition promised in 2010 of Doncaster rail that “we’ll study it, then plan it and build it”, it was not clear to the listener that what the Coalition really meant was “we will kill it off forever”. All the more reason why this $8 billion road plan…

  • Gridlock is to be our lot

    It may have escaped our road-obsessed Premier’s attention but Friday’s horrific B-double crash occurred on exactly that part of CityLink that his east-west link road would connect to. With the link in place, that incident would have jammed east-west link traffic as well, just as Monash Freeway troubles jam up CityLink traffic today. The idea…

  • Motorways: Salami tactics

    It almost defies reason that, with our train system virtually falling apart and car use per capita in decline, this government is hell-bent on committing public money to a road project with 50¢ of benefit for every $1 of costs (The Age: “Western end of project could win priority“, 3/5) When the Bolte Bridge was…

  • Cars remain problem

    The West Gate bridge carries 160,000 vehicles a day (”Trucks test structure of West Gate”, 18/3), but that is only a modest 15 per cent increase on 10 years ago, when it carried 140,000. Then, as now, traffic was forecast to increase by some staggering amount over the next decade. In fact, traffic finds its…

  • Fares not too low

    INFRASTRUCTURE Minister Anthony Albanese’s Major Cities Unit is completely wrong if it thinks Australia’s public transport fares are too low (Urban sprawl hits productivity, 4/12/2012). In fact, relative to cost of living, they are among the highest in the world. The real reason fares only cover one-quarter to one-third of the cost of the system…

  • A legacy of poor decisions

    A legacy of poor decisions November 22, 2012 JOHN Legge (“Transport planning off rails”, Comment, 21/11) hits the nail on the head when it comes to Melbourne’s transport planning failures. Our creaking train system and barely usable bus services are the legacy of decades of secretive pseudo-planning at all levels of government and in the…