As Melbourne’s population is on the brink of an explosion, the controversial Suburban Rail Loop is being pitched as the solution to public transport woes. But critics wonder if it doesn’t need a rethink.
In just eight years, Melbourne is set to usurp Sydney as Australia’s biggest city, experts estimating the southern capital will hit 5.8 million people – ahead of the harbour city – by September 2030. But that’s not all: by 2050, Melbourne’s population will have grown to eight million, covering 150 square kilometres of unbroken suburbia, the kind of sprawl you see in America’s north east.
They’d better get the planning right.
Stretching from Geelong to Gembrook (or thereabouts) a 2050 trip from Melbourne’s eastern periphery to its GPO would take more than two hours on current modes of public transport. Decoupling the city from its CBD is therefore an imperative in the decades ahead, to be accomplished via the relocation of a million or more Melburnians to suburbs like Box Hill in the east and Broadmeadows in the north.
The catalyst for this slow-moving mass migration will be Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) 90km of mainly underground tunnels connecting 15 mega-stations and hubs surrounded, in many instances, by commercial centres and high-rise residential towers. The first trains are expected to run on the loop’s eastern section by 2035, offering a 22-minute journey between Box Hill and Cheltenham.
Essentially, what’s planned is a series of mini CBDs, a “middle ring” of rail-connected hubs to surpass the Chatswoods and Strathfields of Sydney. It’s nothing less than a massive, irreversible reorientation of an already-sizable city.
Preliminary work on the SRL began in June this year.
A project of this size demands a big picture leader with a “crash through or crash, don’t bother me with details” attitude.
Enter Premier Daniel Andrews – some say he fits this bill to a tee – who made SRL the $50 billion centrepiece of his pitch for a big build (with Andrews its chief visionary and proponent) before Labor’s massive win at the 2018 state election.
Inevitably, those details came back to bother Andrews. A cost blowout (SRL’s price tag is now estimated at $125 billion) was followed by an auditor general’s report which concluded its business case did not support “informed investment”, before Infrastructure Australia questioned short term passenger demand and urged both Melbourne and Canberra (which pledged $2.2 billion to the project last month) to delay construction of the SRL’s second stage until it could pay its way.
With another election looming later this month, Andrews’ opponents pounced. The SRL was the “most expensive, yet least scrutinised project in Australia’s history,” Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said, before promising to shelve stage one of the project and divert $35 billion in earmarked funds to Victoria’s troubled health sector.
Beyond the politics, it turns out these cost-benefit concerns are but the tip of the iceberg.
As politicians squabble over the headline issues around SRL, other less-publicised problems fester over its design, its impact on Melburnians’ travel habits, its effects on the city’s environment and how it might diminish Melbourne’s famed livability (that wasn’t already badly damaged by a free for all planning regime under the former Liberal government).
RMIT environment and planning expert, Professor Michael Buxton, in the Melbourne Age, pointed to design flaws that might render the SRL a $125 billion white elephant.
At stations where the SRL would intersect Melbourne’s existing web of rail lines, “passengers must walk up to half a kilometre between lines or exit one station before descending to another,” Buxton wrote. Worse still, early designs for the six stations along the loop’s stage one (SRL East) show several key stops — Cheltenham, Monash, and Burwood — will be a long way by foot from the major centres they’re meant to service.
The Victorian government has put all its infrastructure eggs into the SRL basket, delaying the planned Melbourne Metro 2 project and forcing residents of fast-growing Fishermans Bend to commute by car. Moreover, the placement of SRL stations in middle ring suburbs forces outer-Melbourne residents – some 44 per cent of the city’s population – into a long-term reliance on cars or inadequate existing public transport.
Arguably worst of all, there will be just 15 planned stations along the loop’s entire length, at an average spacing of six kilometres. Many of the residents living along the SRL but not served by nearby stations won’t have an incentive to use it.
Collectively, these issues mean the net shift from roads to public transport generated by SRL will be “only 230,000 trips, or 0.83 per cent of all travel… hardly a decent return on [the $125 billion] eventual expenditure,” Buxton wrote.
Notwithstanding Australia’s slow transition to electric vehicles, one of the points of encouraging people to use trains is that they’re around 10 times more energy-efficient than cars. A train system that fails to incentivise the use of public transport is failing our environment.
Then there’s the impact on Melbourne’s prized Green Wedges, areas set aside in the 1970s for local residents’ health and wellbeing and to help protect some of the 194 animals, 53 invertebrates and 380 plants listed as threatened. In the Heatherton area in Melbourne’s south east to be traversed by SRL’s stage one, residents are up in arms over what they described as the “plundering” of Green Wedge land (a planned “chain of parks”) for a train stabling yard.
“We need [the area] for livability,” local activist Michelle Hornstein said. Instead, as a train yard, the site would pose noise, light and vibration issues for 3000-odd local residents.
Perhaps the SRL’s biggest impact will be on Melbourne’s shape, growth trajectory and land-use. Over a period of decades, large populations will move to centres along the loop’s route, potentially living in higher –rise developments and working and commuting in vastly different circumstances to what they’re currently familiar with.
There are issues over a lack of transparency.
For starters, the SRL Authority (not local councils) control all development along the loop, and land use impacts were barred from a panel evaluating the loop’s environmental effects. Combined with the absence of any policy to regulate high-rise development and the emergence of a developer-friendly code assessment regime, critics say Victorians have been disempowered.
“The government is imposing major projects and higher-density development onto large sections of Melbourne by stealth. This is a plan to have no plan,” Buxton said. (Others say that Melbourne desperately needs to be decentralised and to move away from its single CBD focus, though more in the form of medium density around transport nodes – not in high rise format, which has lost favour with environmentalists)
Without stronger rules requiring energy efficiency and low emissions for new buildings, any style of development will be producing carbon dioxide for decades.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Victoria’s current planning system combined with the likely rise in car dependent travel runs the risk of incentivising higher emissions, and renders the state’s adherence to the Paris Accord a pipe dream.
The SRL would cost Victorians roughly half its current, $125 billion price tag if it weren’t largely a tunnel, according to Professor Jago Dodson, director of RMIT University’s Centre for Urban Research.
“Building a sky rail instead of tunnelling is much cheaper, and it could open the way to a range of options,” such as heavy and light rail, with fewer of the existing plan’s drawbacks, Dodson told The Fifth Estate.
Such options include the postponed Metro 2 tunnel to service growing Fishermans Bend (see image) and a series of cross-city routes over 223km at a “mere” cost of about $31 billion.
The state government maintains its plans would deliver similar benefits for commuters, but the Victorian Greens have warmed to many of the alternative proposals and called for “land-use and transport projects [that are] subject to public audit, assessment and appeal processes”.
A majority Labor government, after elections late this month, might be tempted to ignore such calls. But if recent polling is correct and the Andrews government winds up in minority government, this vision might be held to account by the more nuanced perspective of cross-bench Greens and teal independents.
For the sake of Melbourne’s carbon footprint, livability, land use and sheer sprawl, a little nuance can’t hurt.
The Suburban Rail Authority and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning were approached for comment for this article but did not respond.
…. by 2050, Melbourne’s population will have grown to eight million, covering 150 square kilometres of unbroken suburbia, the kind of sprawl you see in America’s north east. … There used to be a belief that climate change was the greatest threat faced by humanity, but unlike many problems we face we know its cause and how to fix it. So the greatest threat to humanity is humanities stubidity .