Pop’n ponzi strikes again as Melbourne “crush loaded”
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 that Melbourne’s population grew by 800,000 in the decade to June 2014, and that it is projected to balloon out to 7.7 million by 2051, according to the “Plan Melbourne” blueprint, released last year. So, without enormous investment on new roads, public transport, hospitals, schools, and other infrastructure, living standards are will decline.
Those of us that live in Melbourne have experienced the effects first hand. Congestion is growing 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 Age:
More than half of Melbourne’s railway lines are consistently overcrowded in the morning peak, with some trains carrying hundreds more passengers than they are meant to.
In the worst case, on the Cranbourne and Pakenham lines, trains built to carry just under 800 passengers are crammed with more than 1200 people before they reach the city, data shows… the system is failing to cope with passenger growth.
Between May 2014 and May 2015, an extra 4500 commuters joined the Dandenong rail corridor crush in the morning over a four-day survey period, but just one extra morning peak service a day was added to the timetable…
The situation was mirrored on six other lines…
Greens leader Greg Barber said the true picture was worse than PTV’s survey indicated, with 199 of a total 464 services having breached the load standard. About 10 per cent of those services carried more than 1000 passengers…
“This problem has been getting steadily worse for years. This problem hasn’t snuck up on the government, but their only response has been to rip out seats to squeeze more people in.”
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”.
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?
