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From vroom-vroom to whirr-whirr: a solution to the Melbourne gridlock

By Roger Kalla - posted Tuesday, 23 December 2008


The intersection between the Eastern freeway rail link and the Darebin Creek bike path would be a natural point for an exchange were bike riders who do not want to ride to the city could park their bikes and catch the train for the last part of their daily journey. This point would be halfway along the proposed East-West rail way line and roughly where motorists today are invariably finding themselves in a traffic jam on their daily commute into the city along the Eastern freeway.

The trains could be express trains going directly to the university and modelled on the efficient mass transit systems in Singapore.

The snails pace of the traffic during morning rush hour caused by the bottleneck at the city end of the Eastern freeway, has converted the freeway to a virtual car park for tens of thousands of frustrated motorists. The suggestion in the Eddington report of a car tunnel linking up the city end of the Eastern with City link was in response to the east-west transport dilemma in Melbourne but it was based on building a car tunnel and did not consider the lower cost alternatives of bicycles and trains.

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A normally fit bike rider who commutes into the city from Ivanhoe, a distance of 12km, will regularly beat the motorist travelling the same distance and will get the benefit of the daily exercise.

We need to think outside of the box if we want to find sustainable solutions to the transport problems facing Melbourne particularly since we are entering a carbon restrained future. The combination of bike-train commuting is a win-win solution that wouldn’t take 16 years to implement like that other missing road link and would not cost $8 billion to complete.

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About the Author

Dr Roger Kalla is the Director of his own Company, Korn Technologies, and a stakeholder in Australia’s agricultural biotechnology future. He is also a keen part time nordic skier and an avid reader of science fiction novels since his mispent youth in Arctic Sweden. Roger is a proud member of the Full Montes bike riding club of Ivanhoe East.

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