Calls to "build the East-West Link" persist - perhaps its time to redefine it?

The Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is the latest industry body, lobby or political group to add 'building the East-West Link' to an infrastructure wishlist.  

Their top priority is planning for an airport in Melbourne's south east, presumably one out on the former Koo Wee Rup swamp at Monomeith, and the East-west Link is number two on the list, as reported in the HUN.

“What I’m talking about there is the white vans making deliveries,” Mark Stone, chief executive of the VCCI, told the Herald Sun. “We are still saying that the East West Link is a vital part of infrastructure. Politics is such that if Labor is elected it will not be done at the next election term.”

Let's unpackage that statement.

How would a tunnel linking the Eastern and Tullamarine freeways aid in allowing 'the white vans making deliveries around the city'? 

The primary benefit of large-scale road building in the inner city for the freight & logistics sectors is that transport from entry points - like the Port of Melbourne - to distribution centres becomes faster.  Little white vans don't pick their deliveries up from the docks, they get them from a distribution centre.

If we cast our minds back to the East-West link as approved by the former planning minister, there was to be an entry and exit ramp for Flemington Road coming out of the tunnel from the east and a triangle interchange with the Tullamarine Freeway/City Link that would have consumed a fair chunk of Royal Park (see Red + Black Architect's analysis in the lead image above).

Traffic from the east would be deposited on Flemington Road; would be directed onto CityLink either north or southbound or would be set to travel further, once the second phase of the project was completed, down the new road past the port and into the western tunnel.

I struggle to see how that specific set up would help the little white vans making deliveries around the inner-city.

In many ways, groups lobbying for more road projects in the inner-city are living the 50s, 60s and 70s dream of complete freedom in private vehicles - our roads are all open-access, some of them you have to pay a toll, but we don't designate specific roads for a specific purpose and perhaps this is where the East-West Link truly lost the argument with the local communities affected by it.

The project, as approved by Matthew Guy and just like the West Gate Tunnel and North East Link under the Andrews Government banks on the fact there will be a lot of toll-paying private vehicle usage when the centre of the city is the place where we not only don't want, but really don't need more private vehicles jockeying for public space.  Central Melbourne isn't the hole in the doughnut city we were of the 1980s anymore.

Another key argument for the East-West link, back in the day, was it provided a second high-quality road crossing between Western and Eastern Melbourne, yet now we're seeing an enormous road project that's going to do just that - the North East Link.  It will also link the industrial and logistics sectors in the north with Melbourne's east.

Infrastructure Victoria still has some form of link from the Eastern Freeway to Citylink in its needs assessment - and it's much vaguer than other projects on its list.

If the East-West Link ever rears its ugly head again, perhaps next time the proposal should be for a complete bypass tunnel, a single lane in each direction, for freight vehicles only.

I'm guessing it mightn't stack up, therefore, it would rely on private vehicles, which in turn would expand the scope - you'd need more traffic lanes - and then we'd be back to square one. It's been 4 years since local communities and councils were out with the pitchforks, it''s still very much in people's mind and since then the inner-city has seen even more people move to it.

In order to let the little white vans make their deliveries more efficiently, the focus should be on getting more people out of their cars in the inner-city so the existing high-quality arterial network can see more productive use by the logistics sector.

Lead image credit: Red + Black Architect.