Melbourne train commuters ‘crush loaded’ by population ponzi

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By Leith van Onselen

I’ll ask the question once again: What do you get when you shove an MCG-worth of people into a city each year, without sufficient new infrastructure investment?

Answer: Infrastructure bottlenecks, rising congestion, and lower living standards.

Let’s recall yesterday’s population data for Victoria (read Melbourne), whereby a whopping 114,865 new residents were added to the population in the year to March 2016, mostly via immigration:

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And let’s recall the Victorian Government’s own population projections, which forecasts a whopping 115,000 new residents for the state each and every year for the next 36 years, with Melbourne’s population projected to swell by 75% to 8 million:

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Again, with most of this growth coming via immigration:

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Those of us that live in Melbourne have experienced the effects first hand. Congestion is getting worse each and every year, with the city’s roads now choked with traffic much of the time. Users of the city’s public transport system are not fairing much better, with “crush loads” now a frequent occurrence, as noted today in The ABC:

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Overcrowding on Melbourne’s trains has worsened over the past year, with half of all services on the Craigieburn line crammed with more people than they should be during the morning peak.

Public Transport Victoria (PTV) figures show 20 per cent of all morning peak-hour Metro trains were overcrowded during its May survey, with the Craigieburn, Sunbury, Cranbourne and Pakenham lines bearing the brunt of the load.

The percentage of Craigieburn services breaching the load standard jumped from 40 to 50 per cent in the past year.

On the Sunbury line, 40 per cent of morning peak-hour trains were overcrowded, along with 37.5 per cent of Cranbourne and Pakenham line trains running along the busy Dandenong corridor…

Opposition spokesman Matthew Guy warned the overcrowding was only going to get worse.

“We can build Melbourne Metro, we can build Metro one, two or three — it won’t solve the problem if there are eight million people in Melbourne and we don’t have a plan to decentralise our population,” he said.

Which brings me, once again, to the sage comments from The Australia Institute’s Richard Denniss, who last year noted the following about the deleterious implications arising from Australia’s population fetish:

“Australia is one of the fastest growing countries in the developed world and our infrastructure isn’t keeping up. It isn’t keeping up now and hasn’t kept up for the last 10 years, and it’s not budgeted to keep up in the next 10.”

“What politicians are doing is every year they announce record spending on this and a new that, but what they don’t point out is that on a per person basis, per person we are spending less on health, per person we’ve got less access to transport, per person the reason the queues in the hospital keeps getting longer is because we are not building hospitals as fast as we are growing our population. They all know it, they just don’t say it”…

“If you want to double your population – and that’s our plan – we want to double our population – you have to at least double your infrastructure to maintain people’s standard of living… We’re talking schools, we’re talking hospitals, we’re talking trains, we’re talking roads, we’re talking police”…

“Population growth costs a lot… If you double the number of citizens then you double the number of teachers and double the number of nurses. It’s pretty simple math. But of course, you don’t have to double them if you gradually plan to lower the number of services. If you are happy for us to gradually lower the number of services in our health system, our aged system, if you are happy for congestion to gradually get worse, if you are happy for the amount of green space per person to decline, then you can do what we do”.

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If all Australia is doing is growing for growth’s sake, pushing against infrastructure bottlenecks, diluting its fixed endowment of minerals resources, and failing to raise the living standards of the existing population, where is the benefit?

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.