Just days after the Grattan Institute released propaganda claiming “Australia’s urban commuters have little to fear from population growth”, that “migration has not brought cities to a standstill”, and that the impact of population growth is “benign”, the truth has been revealed yet again, with Victoria’s trains and trams breaching capacity loads despite the mass removal of seats, which has forced passengers to stand. From The Age:
Overcrowding on Melbourne’s trains increased this year, despite the recent completion of a project to take out seats and make more standing room. There was also significantly more peak-hour overcrowding on trams…
Multiple metropolitan rail lines experienced an increase in peak-hour overcrowding this year, with the South Morang, Hurstbridge and Frankston lines among those that had the biggest jump… The Werribee, Sunbury and Craigieburn lines, all of which service growth corridors in Melbourne’s west, were again among the city’s most congested lines…
A train is recorded as overcrowded if it contains more than 900 passengers. The old benchmark was 798 passengers, before all Metro trains were reconfigured to make extra standing room in a project that was completed last year.
…Trams also grew more crowded in the peak in the year to May.
This is the empirical evidence from 15-years of turbo charged immigration: Worsening traffic congestion, crush-loaded infrastructure and public services, and deteriorating housing affordability and quality.
And the living situation in the major cities will only deteriorate as the ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration policy rolls on, with Infrastructure Australia projecting worsening traffic congestion and reduced access to jobs, schools, hospitals and open space as Sydney’s and Melbourne’s populations soar to 7.4 million and 7.3 million people respectively by 2046, irrespective of how these cities build-out:
Grattan needs to display some honesty and stop gaslighting the community into believing that a ‘Big Australia’ is good for them and will lift their living standards, when the empirical evidence and their own lived experience tells them otherwise.
