Common Urban Myths About Transport

Myth: A continuous freeway network will eliminate bottlenecks

Fact: Linking freeways only shifts bottlenecks from one place to another, as people still have to reach their final destinations.

Everyone in Melbourne knows that there are freeways that appear to 'dead-end', as the Eastern Freeway does at Hoddle Street. Isn't it reasonable for the government to connect the dead-ends, so traffic can flow seamlessly from one freeway to another?

A bit of history is helpful. Most freeway proposals for Melbourne date back to the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan, which proposed a Los Angeles-style grid of freeways criss-crossing the entire city. The present Eastern Freeway appears in this plan as the F19, originally intended to continue through the centre of Fitzroy and Carlton and join another inner-city freeway in North Melbourne.

These inner-city links in the 1969 plan were cancelled by Premier Hamer in 1973 because they would have destroyed thousands of homes, historic buildings and parks. This decision was reaffirmed by the Federal Government in 1974. The Eastern Freeway was not opened until December 1977, so the 'dead-end' was created by road planners with full knowledge of the problems it would produce.

Now that the Eastern Freeway extension has heightened pressure on this deliberately-created dead end, some road lobbyists have called for the reinstatement of the inner-city freeways.

[The transport industry] is pushing for [the Eastern-Tullamarine link] to avoid a nightmare gridlock scenario once the Mitcham-Frankston Freeway opens in 2008....The government official in charge of the Mitcham-Frankston Freeway, Ken Mathers, has urged road users to lobby for a solution to the notorious snarl....He said road users should be telling politicians that something needs to be done to the city end of the Eastern Freeway.
---Herald Sun, 23 August 2004

So, freeways do not solve anyone's problems; they just create demand for more freeways.

It is also misleading to suggest that most freeway traffic is headed for another freeway. People don't drive around just to explore the freeway system: they have a final destination which usually is off the freeway altogether. In the case of the Eastern Freeway, the Government's own Northern Central City Corridor Study showned that only 15% of the traffic (including the trucks) is heading for the Tullamarine Freeway or due west; the vast majority is headed for the city centre. Extending the Eastern Freeway inward would just shift the bottleneck at Hoddle Street to other roads like Nicholson Street or Lygon Street. The desire to drive into the CBD will not disappear just because two freeways have been joined up.

Current VicRoads freeway plans actually propose to more than double the size of the existing freeway network, not just make a few links. This will increase traffic problems on other roads, not reduce them. The road planners are proposing 'more of the same medicine' to address problems that they themselves created. It's time we stopped taking the medicine and switched doctors!

As part of the switch, it is possible to turn 'dead ends' from a problem to an advantage. Since most traffic on Melbourne's radial freeways is heading to the central city, it should be possible to apply a 'demand management' scheme similar to that used in Copenhagen. Traffic lights at the city ends of Melbourne's radial freeways can be used to limit the amount of traffic entering the city to a level that does not overcrowd roads in the centre. A strategy of this kind will work best when accompanied by radically improved public transport, as the PTUA proposes elsewhere.

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© 2007 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611.
General copying and distribution on a non-commercial basis is permitted subject to proper acknowlegement.
Authorised by Tony Morton, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, for the PTUA

Last Modified: 21 October 2004