William McDougall, a transport planner with 40 years’ experience, is the latest to bemoan the crippling cost of Melbourne’s infrastructure projects. From The Age:
Victoria’s politicians have thrown away the benefits of the state’s stamp duty bonanza and the proceeds from the Port of Melbourne sale over recent years by investing in politically motivated, badly conceived road projects. They have also delayed and dumbed down vital public transport projects.
All of this has been for purely political reasons, yet it hasn’t even delivered political success: the last two state elections have been lost on transport grounds. The next could go the same way.
We in the real world have known for years that building more roads generates more traffic and worsens congestion. For this reason, Melbourne’s growth and economic success is best served by putting public transport first, not last.
Last Friday, as the end of the year approached, the government released the heavily redacted contract with Transurban for the West Gate Tunnel. It will cost Victorians billions, unnecessarily, and yet it is just the latest in a string of foolish road projects this state has embarked on…
Adding insult to injury, both the main parties now support the North East Link, and the Liberals want to resurrect the East West Link. Both will load up the Eastern Freeway, which I fully expect will then need widening – and tolling – as part of the deal. Thus we’ll probably end up with tolls on CityLink, the West Gate Tunnel, the East West Link, the North East Link, the Eastern Freeway and EastLink.
This ridiculous frenzy of road construction will swallow up resources for two decades, preventing any more major public transport improvements after Melbourne Metro. We’ll end up with even greater car dependency and road congestion…
As someone who has been involved at the highest level in Victoria as a transport planner for many years, I am thoroughly disgusted by the mess our politicians have created.
Efforts by planners like me over the years to engender some sanity in the process have been ignored. I feel as though my entire career has been in vain.
Leaving aside the absurd notion that building more roads necessarily worsens traffic congestion [does anyone honestly believe that Melbourne’s traffic congestion would be better today if the road projects built over the past 25 years – e.g. CityLink, EastLink and Peninsular Link – were never built?], McDougall is right to question the dodgy processes used to pick infrastructure projects. MB, too, has done so regularly over the years, as have institutions like the Productivity Commission (PC).
Still, one wonders why experts like McDougall never question the underlying demand driver of these projects: the federal government’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy?
After all, it is the extra 100,000-plus people flooding Melbourne every year that is causing the congestion and driving the costly infrastructure ‘fixes’. And in an already built-up city like Melbourne, the cost of retrofitting new infrastructure to accommodate greater population densities necessarily becomes prohibitively expensive because of the need for land buy-backs, tunneling, as well as disruptions to existing infrastructure – basic ‘dis-economies of scale’.
Don’t just take my word for it. The PC’s Shifting the Dial: 5 year productivity review, released in October, explicitly noted that infrastructure costs will inevitably balloon due to our cities’ rapidly growing populations:
Growing populations will place pressure on already strained transport systems… Yet available choices for new investments are constrained by the increasingly limited availability of unutilised land. Costs of new transport structures have risen accordingly, with new developments (for example WestConnex) requiring land reclamation, costly compensation arrangements, or otherwise more expensive alternatives (such as tunnels).
Dr Jane O’Sullivan, honorary senior research fellow at the University of Queensland’s School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, noted similar concerns last month:
“It costs more than $100,000 in public money per person that we add to our population”…
“So if we’re growing at 1.6 per cent, we’re spending more than 10 per cent of GDP just running in order to stand still, not improving the level of service we’re able to provide people, simply keeping up with the number of hospital beds and school classes to keep things at a level standard.
“To a large extent we are not keeping pace, we’re actually falling behind, so the quality of life people are enjoying is going backwards.”
Dr O’Sullivan said the “usual rejoinder” was that governments had failed to spend adequately on infrastructure, but the numbers didn’t bear that out.
“They have more than increased their spending in proportion to population growth, it’s just becoming increasingly expensive as our megacities cities become bigger and denser”…
“The cost of every extra person becomes more expensive because suddenly you have to build road tunnels, high-rises, refit increased sewerage capacity.
“People think Australia has a small population, but out cities are huge by developed country standards. They’re way past economies of scale, to [arguably] diseconomies of scale.”
The $5.5 billion West Gate Tunnel project is a textbook example of the dis-economies of scale so often attached to modern Australian infrastructure ‘solutions’. So are the Metro Tunnel, the North East Link, and the East West Link.
Clearly, the most obvious and least cost policy solution to mitigate the big cities’ infrastructure woes is for the Victorian State Government to lobby its federal counterpart to significantly dial back Australia’s immigration program, thus forestalling the need for costly new infrastructure projects in the first place. Because under current mass immigration settings, expensive solutions like those listed above will be required over and over again as rapid population growth continually outstrips the supply of transport infrastructure. And these costs will be borne by incumbent residents either through higher taxes or tolls.
