Wrong Way: Go Back

Commercial vehicles make up less than 8% of Melbourne’s traffic with truck freight predominately carried on the Monash-CityLink- West Gate and Western Ring Road, servicing Melbourne’s industrial clusters in the north, west and south-east.

Ending traffic congestion by shifting commuters off freeways (and onto fast, frequent public transport) would enable the quick and efficient transport of freight on freeways and where required, arterial roads.

However, in the longer term, urban road freight tonnage is predicted to increase 70% by 2020 and there is an urgent need to provide an alternative to the dominance of road freight.

A higher proportions of freight currently transported by trucks should be carried by trains. It’s the state government’s policy to do so, but the policy is failing.

For example, of all the containers moving through the Port of Melbourne, only 0.4% of containers moving to and from metropolitan destinations are transported by trains and only 17.4% of all containers go by rail to regional Victoria or interstate.

A 2008 State Government review found that up to 10% of the rail freight network is inoperable and due to low levels of investment is close to collapse. The review made it clear that this would have unacceptable environmental consequences because rail has 90% fewer CO2 emissions per tonne of freight than trucks.

Victorian Rail Freight Network Review 2008 “Switchpoint: the template for rail freight to revive and thrive!” (Page 4)

We need to turn around this rapid decline.

In the metropolitan area rail freight should target the transport of containers and bulk cargo by:

• immediately integrating the Port of Melbourne and the Dynon rail precinct to provide rail connection to the port and the developing a rail freight/container clearing centre;

• building freight hubs and warehousing in industrial clusters in Melbourne’s west, north and south-east serviced by rail shuttles from the port and other cluster centres. See “A Toolkit for the Development of Intermodal Hubs in Victoria 2007,” Victorian Freight and Logistics Council.