Melbourne & Australian Architecture Topics

I wish people in Melbourne would realise how lucky they are to have trams and the state government would do something to help the system.

While other cities like Sydney and Brisbane are thinking in the 21st century are looking to expand networks, Melbourne's famous tram system is ailing with the deliberate help of government bodies and their 1960s attitudes.

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Trams are in danger, says expert
By Dan Silkstone
Transport Reporter
August 8, 2005

Melbourne's trams are some of the world's slowest, and are getting slower, says a transport bureaucrat.

Victoria's tram system is in danger of "dying on its feet", the state's most senior public transport bureaucrat says.

The diagnosis was delivered by Jim Betts, the Bracks Government's director of public transport. The Government appointed Mr Betts last year to get the public transport system back on track after several years of turmoil following privatisation in 1999.

"Unless we do something to improve tram priority we will see tram journey times slowing down and becoming less reliable … if we don't do something to try and shore up our tram system and give trams more priority then the system is in danger of dying on its feet," he said.

Mr Betts' warning follows similar doomsaying earlier this year by Yarra Trams, whose chief executive, Hubert Guyot, told The Age in April that the tram system was being strangled by traffic and faced a major crisis within 15 years if drastic action was not taken.
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"We have no choice," Mr Guyot said of the controversial changes aimed at speeding up tram travel times. "We have to convince them (the public) and to implement our program because without this program the system is going to die."

The tram network that crisscrosses Melbourne is one of the largest in the world but also one of the slowest. According to Yarra Trams, Melbourne ranks in the bottom fifth for speed on a list of 72 tram networks worldwide.

Mr Betts said 65 per cent of Melbourne's tram network shared roads. As traffic congestion increases by 2 per cent each year, tram times are slowing.

The Government's response — the $30 million Think Tram project — uses a range of methods to try to speed trams by 25 per cent but has met fierce resistance as it has been trialled or rolled out in busy shopping strips such as Clarendon Street, in South Melbourne, and Collins Street, in the city. Last week, the City of Yarra protested bitterly as 12 mature elms were felled to make way for "super stops" along Swan Street, Richmond.

Mr Betts admitted some changes, such as hook turns, super stops and cuts to conventional stops, could have been handled better. But it was vital to convince people of the need for big changes and to introduce them in a way that did not make them feel imposed from above.

"If we don't have an efficient system for mass transit, we will stop being the world's most liveable city and we'll turn into downtown Los Angeles," he said. "One tram equals 120 people. Imagine if those 120 people were using their own cars."

William,

Yes, it's a sad tale. I really don't know what they can do about the situation. Certainly, I agree with you. Melbourne's tram system has served the city well since ...when ? ...the 1880s or thereabouts?

Indeed, despite all the criticism it gets, our entire public transport network has done us proud over the years. Between the "Trolleys", trains and buses we have had little to complain about. But, the times they are, most definitely, a-changing.

Road congestion in many parts of the metro area is rapidly approaching crisis point. In the inner suburbs there is virtually no possibility of being able to widen major "carrigeways" such as Punt, Bridge, Williams Roads etc, etc ...

Unfortunately, there's no "levelling out" in regard to the number of vehicles which are using our roads i.e. there's just more and more piling on to the black top year each year with very few "retirements".

I'm just wondering if we may, in fact, be paying the price for the unchecked suburban sprawl which we have been actively encouraging since the 1950s ? As new suburbs have been opened up further and further "Out", away from the city and beyond the reach of public transport our dependency on cars has increased accordingly.

A few weeks ago,I had to drive in peak hour traffic for the fist time in years (between 8.30 and 9.00 am). It was certainly a culture shock for me, as someone who has been working from home since 1990. Crawling through Toorak and Burnley, over the bridge to Richmond I honestly could not believe the mess - I mean , just total, bloody chaos.

I'm afraid that our love (or need) of / for the automobile may well be our undoing in the end.

Regards

Beachy Bleechy

Of course we're paying the price for the suburban nightmare, I mean dream.

The solution is so simple in theory, but no-one wants to take it seriously: roll back road expansion and reinvest the same money directly into public transport.

the talk is being talked, there's just no walking the walk! (well there's fairy steps being walked, but it's buggar all).

And no our PT network is not good, it's shithouse - it's disorderly, infrequent (excluding certain corridors), too many solitary modes - very little integration and is a little above average in the fare department compared to other world-wide systems.

I personally wish everyone would stop making excuses and look at it for what it has become in this freeway-centric world that we live in.

Yes I agree totally with Tayser! Roll back the investment in roads and put in directly into public transport. With the increase in the price of petrol our public transport system can't cope with the new demand on its resources. And regardless of that, we need to improve our public transport to get more people off the roads and reduce the traffic congestion before it gets far worse, which it will. We have plenty of examples of the future we are facing in the larger cities of the world with their traffic jams and pollution out of control.

Cynics may suggest that it simply isn't in the interests of either big business nor ANY state government to curb the outward expansion of suburbia.

I only have to use public transport (trains) on rare occasions so I''m not qualified to talk about the system as a regular user. Perhaps I have a "Dream Image" of the system which is a tad out of date ? I know that the Sandringham line is copping an absolute tirade of abuse at the moment - allegedly the most inefficient line in the metro area ?

Successive Victorian governments have been winding down the system for a long time. I clearly remember when they got rid of tram conductors, then railway porters got the pink slip. Finally they sold off the train system completely (?). But wasn't there meant to be some sort of "performance clause" in the Connex (?) deal whereby they had to guarantee regular services and punctuality ?

I don't see how they will stop the outward expansion of suburbia in a city like Melbourne. The dye was cast back in the 1880s at the time of the great land boom.

With real estate prices closer to the city having now reached stratospheric levels, those who wish to buy into the traditional quarter acre dream for the first time are having to move further and further "out".

The argument is simple - if you want the convenience of being close to the city with short tram, train and bus journeys available from your doorstep, you have to be prepared to pay for it .... and pay dearly.

The days of buying a house anywhere near the city on a single basic wage have long gone. I can remember as a kid in the early 1960s visiting a "farm" at Doncaster which belonged to a family friend. There were still vast tracts of undeveloped land out through places like Box Hill, Glen Waverley, even Chadstone. Suburbs like Scorseby, Croydon, Rowville barely existed.

Beachy Bleechy

To address some of the bits and pieces you mentioned: tram conductors - complete waste of taxpayers & now Yarra Tram's money, sure they provided a 'human face' but their job will be completely irrelevant once smartcards take the complexity out of the fare system (although conductors would aid in decreasing fare evasion - that alone is not a good reason to bring them back).

Sandy inefficiencies: there are just as many other lines that are just as inefficient, the core problem is that as people start to realise that PT will be a cheaper option rather than driving their Toorak tractor or Sunshine Audi to work / shop / play, the current system will not cope. Sandringham terminates & is therefore a slave to, at Flinders Street, they (using train terminology) 'turn the trains around' at the biggest node on the network, when the Williamstown line does the same thing. When will someone in DOI have a brainfart and realise that they can make it more 'efficient' and reduce the dwell times at Flinders on both lines & give Williamstown a wholesale service increase by connecting the two lines so they're just one big long line straight through Flinders St. Sandringham might also need a 2nd terminus platform so they load / unload trains at the end more efficiently.

I could be here for hours pointing out every inefficiency I can see in my travels, but the above is just an example.

And we bastardise our train network and use it for multiple things when the infrastructure won't support it, especially now when patronage is increasing due to smarter people waking up to themselves & high fuel prices. Our train network is perfect for the middle & outer suburban commuter, straight from the sprawlbelt to the city wham-bam-thank-you-mam no dramas, bob's yer uncle etc, but now more people along the lines want to use it to get to their local shops (for instance between Caulfield and Clayton/Springvale, I've noticed a lot more people actually using the line as 'transit' between home and shops) and that packs each train as you have both the suburban-nightmare commuters cramming the express trains that stop at major nodes and you're increasingly seeing the same people who want to get from node to node quickly trying to do that - it's overloading the system.

The Siemens trains are really good for long distances (less doors, more seats) but they're running stopping all services where there should be more door capacity for higher throughput and that's just not happening.

AND there's the killer: buggar all integration, bus frequencies absolutely suck, the routes are designed for the odd granny wanting to get to the local shops and has time to wait for a bus (1 hour in most pathetic cases) not the average joe who just wants to get where they have to go. Buses need to be long straight lines so people don't have to look at a map to know where it does, they need to be frequent - as well as trains - and they need to connect with stations more cohesively.

Melbourne's rail lines were built before roads thus the reason why you have to many level crossings that are now nothing more than a barrier each in each suburb. To correct this, in many instances, sinking the tracks and stations underneath the roads, (think of South Yarra station as that's the prime example) allows the station entrance to front the street and not turn away from it, allowing you to walk straight out of the station to the footpath / centre of the road for a tram/bus - simple & easy, connections that just don't happen in this so-called well 'public transportised' city - it's bollocks. Then there's the NIMBY problem of not wanting 'heritage' stations being demolished - when most are pretty much useless, case in point: Camberwell. The stations with true heritage potential, unfortunately for the tryhard Toorak residents of Camberwell, are actually located around Toorak. And Camberwell is a great case of a truly dysfunctional station: the entraces face side streets and car parks & not Burke Road, they don't have seamless connections with buses (what buses? myep) nor trams, and it's prone to the 'fear of public transport & walking in the dark' syndrome.

Melbourne2030 & higher-densities metro-wide mark a shift from the suburban paradigm as we know it, but they're just not committing to the extremely large task of public transport investment, where if they did, a lot of private sector projects (given local councils got off their arses and put structure plans in place) would fire up and help reduce the cost for government to upgrade the public transport system - by selling air rights and developing lower-cost housing (wouldn't take much for government to subsidise a certain percentage for just that market in each case), commercial developments and the likes.

What will kill that strategy is a combination of multiple things: the road lobby, the fact that VicRoads has a direct line of comms to the minister & public transport is just a 'unit' of DOI with multiple bureaucratic layers above it, the insistence of the government to 'package' transportation projects which are merely 90% roads and 10% public transport (When it should 10% roads and 90% public transport) and the fact that there are 2.5million suburbanites who pretty much don't know anything other than getting in their car to take them where-ever they want to go.