The Metro Tunnel will improve things, but on its own it won’t alleviate the housing shortage. Melbourne needs to get over its fear of housing density and start replacing some of its bungalows and low-rise units with apartment developments (think 5-6 stories, with shops at floor level), and not assuming that each resident will own a car.
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Anyone else got the nagging feeling that the tunnel is going to have hardly any visibly positive effect and be viewed in the short term as a big waste of time and money?
I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it. But I’m betting we see news articles about how few people use its stations/line and don’t notice improved frequency of trains on the other lines. And that PT usage is down anyway. And while the improved capacity is likely necessary going into the future, it may be pretty underwhelming in the short term.
Am I off here? Anyone else see obvious benefits from it?
It happens every time something other than a road is constructed.
True! Cars do tend to fill roads up though.
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For sure
Maybe the media would make a fuss about Arden not being used much (because the area around it’s not developed at all) but I think the system will be used pretty well. Honestly I think there will be a big improvement on the burnley and northern groups, because capacity will be freed up by moving Sunbury and Dandenong to the metro tunnel
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Passenger numbers at Parkville might be pretty impressive pretty quickly.
Very true.
Another aspect of the new Parkville station I’m not sure I’ve seen mentioned much is that it’s not just for the University.
There’ll now be a train station right at the hospital (and surrounding facilities). Which sounds like a big deal to me.
Yea … and many might not realise, but the entrances and exits to the station, including lifts, are literally right outside the hospital. Like a train and lift will get you straight to the emergency department!
I didn’t realise this until I visited the site recently.
I used to live on the Sunbury line (2018-2023) and even when I did, I wasn’t a huge fan. I won’t knock it until I actually get to use it, but I really thought it was just going to be annoying to try and connect with trains on other lines, since rather than getting on a train to Flinders then connecting onto my next destination, I’d have to get off at town Hall, then walk to Flinders, then connect to my train. Or even worse would be the connections with the Craigieburn and upfield lines, which will no longer be a walk across the platform at North Melbourne.
It’s not the end of the world, but it’s the sort of thing that would’ve added time to my commute (Sunbury line to Craigieburn line, at the time). It’ll be good to see CBTC/HCS rolled out to Sunbury, though. Some days, they ran so many trains, that the signalling was barely keeping up. Trains were occasionally as close as 3 mins during peak, and a combination of peak hour chaos slowing things down, and trains not clearing signals fast enough mean that they ended up running more like every 5-7 minutes, and always a few mins behind.
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Ok.
Just sharing my perspective.
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I expect this will do wonders to improve the frequency and reliability of the Sunbury/Pakenham lines since they’ll be basically isolated from the rest of the network.
The government will need to keep separating lines from one another to fix the CBD crunch.
Yea it makes total sense that those lines will do very well out of this, for sure. And, that line is probably better connected now. No going through the loop and all of that confusion. Instead there will be stops at the south and north ends of the city and one near carlton or the vic market (as well as one near the botanical gardens and albert park if anyone is interested in that) … with easy exchanges for Southern Cross and other lines.
But overall, yea, it does seem to pose the question of what to do with the loop. If it becomes clear that the Sunbury/Pakenham line is doing well as a metro style line … why not all of the others too right, as you say?
I don’t know if it’s a common suggestion … but would it be viable to simply take other lines out of the loop and have the trains turn around and stick to their line with dedicated trains just going around the loop for particular access to other parts of the CBD? It does seem the loop has had its time and that its retirement couldn’t come sooner. The dense inner city has expanded beyond the boundaries of the Hoddle grid with Southbank, Docklands and general inner city development. While the connection between Flinders and Southern Cross seems like a massive and aging bottle neck. I don’t know if it could feasibly be taken down, but it sure as hell is holding the whole north bank of the Yarra back. Are there freight trains that rely on this connection?
So, maybe utility trains running
Flinders - Parliament - Melb Cent - Flagstaff - Southern Crossback and forth, regularly enough that you never have to worry about the schedule … with all of the other lines terminating wherever and turning around. Not quite a metro, but could it maybe improve efficiency?deleted by creator
crazy that they wouldnt with all the freight and vline services in addition to Metro services.
Gotta say as someone who’s been using the train system for three decades, this shit is badly needed, and has been for some time.
Our train system as is is good for Australia. That’s kinda like saying I can beat up denizens of a kindergarten. Go try another country and you’ll see why vast works are needed
Oh I’m not denying the need for upgrades etc. In fact, that’s kinda my point, that one metro line is kinda small compared to what’s needed and yet has been marketed as this massive world changing upgrade. Thus my fear that the political climate will consider it a waste of money and potentially start building more highways or something.
I’ll be honest, I’m not really sure what it will achieve other than new inner city stations? Parkville is needed due to the uni and hospitals, but I don’t really know how useful the others will be. The inner city is already exceptionally well serviced by public transport compared to the rest of Melbourne. So it kinda seems like it’s just making it better for existing users that already have it pretty damn good? I don’t live or work anywhere that will benefit, so I’m a bit meh about it.
The main point is to disentangle those lines from the city loop. That way more services can be run and since the lines will be independent a problem on one line won’t bring down the entire network any more.
That Arden station facade is absolutely huge. But why? Why spend so much money on such a large facility when the Paris metro gets by fine with only using this much space. It just feels like it’s more inconvenient for the users since they have to walk an extra couple of hundred metres for no good reason. And it looks unnecessarily expensive both in building costs and real estate when a smaller entrance would do just fine.
