VIC: New $10.5 billion transport plan
By Steve Bracks, Victorian Premier
The new $10.5 billion transport and liveability plan is the most comprehensive plan since Robert Hoddle laid out the grid for Melbourne’s CBD in 1837.
Date: 07 August 2006
VICTORIA’S transport system faces three big challenges over the next 25 years. It needs to keep up with our growth. It needs to keep up with our changing way of life. And its disparate elements – road, rail, tram and buses; metropolitan and regional—need to become fully integrated.
Meeting Our Transport Challenges, our Government’s new $10.5 billion transport and liveability statement, has the right plans and investments to meet those three challenges and ensure Victoria remains one of the most liveable places in the world.
Victoria’s population and economic growth has been remarkable since 1999. Our economy has grown by 21% with more than 300,000 new jobs being created – and our population is booming. Melbourne is now growing faster than Sydney and Brisbane – at a rate of almost 800 people a week – and Provincial Victoria is growing even faster than Melbourne.
Over the next 25 years, that growth will continue, with our State’s population set to increase by 1.2 million people – and more than one-in-four of those new Victorians settling in Provincial Victoria.
This growth is undoubtedly placing a strain on our transport system – creating congestion on our roads and stretching peak hour public transport to the limit. For example, metropolitan rail patronage increased by 6.5% last year – and traffic on the Monash and West Gate Freeways is increasing at a rate of 5% a year.
As well as growing, our way of life is changing. Jobs are shifting from the city to the suburbs and regional centres. As a result, more people are travelling from suburb to suburb and regional centre to regional centre, rather than from the suburbs to the city.
Saddled with a 19th century public transport system designed to take people only from A-to-B (the suburbs to the city) rather than A-to-Z (the suburbs and the regions to anywhere and everywhere), the majority of working families are now forced to run a second car – stretching family budgets and congesting arterial roads across the State.
Our Government has invested $6 billion in transport infrastructure over the past seven years – including $3 billion on public transport projects – to alleviate the strain on our transport system, but there is still more work to be done.
Changing the system
In short, we need to change the way our transport system works.
- We need safer roads in the growth areas in outer metropolitan and regional areas. We need to ease the strain on major freeways like the Monash and West Gate.
- We need smarter integration of tram, train and bus timetables and services – and new public transport services that take people where they want to go without detouring through the city.
- We need Meeting Our Transport Challenges – a plan that will change the way our transport works over the next 25 years to reflect the way we live.
But Victorians won’t have to wait until 2031 to see changes in their transport system. Over the next 12 months, they will see more train and tram services; new timetables with better connections between trains, trams and buses; the introduction of Regional Fast Rail services; and new bus services.
Within four years, our public transport system will be delivering an extra 24,000 extra public transport services every week and carrying an extra 50 million passengers every year – local bus services alone will have been increased by 22%.
Over the next decade major investments – such as a $1.4 billion boost to Melbourne’s bus network, $577 million to boost to Melbourne’s tram network and $2.9 billion boost to Melbourne’s rail network – will dramatically increase the frequency, quality and safety of our public transport.
There will also be a $1 billion upgrade of the Monash and West Gate Freeways and a $2.7 billion investment to improve arterial roads across the State and target the road toll. And transport needs over the next 25 years will be identified and planned for.
This $10.5 billion project is a major investment in the future of our State. It will help more working families save money, cut congestion and travel times, and help us get ahead of the big challenges we face.
NOTE: This is an edited extract of a recent speech.
