Myth: We'd have to spend heaps of money on infrastructure

Fact: Melbourne does not need billions of dollars spent on new train or tram lines. All we need are some inexpensive extensions to the current network, plus drastic improvements in service levels and a management overhaul. These measures will largely pay for themselves.

In its Environmental Effects Statement for the CityLink project in the early 1990s, VicRoads invented a 'public transport alternative' designed to cast the new road in a favourable light. It claimed this alternative would require capital expenditure of $3.5 to $4.5 billion, three times as much as CityLink itself.

Most of the cost was for two items, a north-south rail link in the mid-Eastern suburbs (which is not needed because few people travel in this corridor, and the Burke and Glenferrie Road trams could be upgraded to provide the necessary links) and additional platforms at inner city stations like Richmond. Given that Richmond station was expanded from 6 platforms to 10 in the late 1950s, when rail patronage was higher than it is now, it should be clear that no additional platforms are needed.

The need to spend billions on new rail lines is another road lobby fairy story - albeit one where the road lobby is amply supported by our public transport bureaucracy, as we see below. Although some extensions are needed, Melbourne currently has the largest urban rail system in the world relative to population, and the largest tram system outside Europe. The problem is a shortage of passengers, not of tracks!

By the time it came to doing an EES for the Scoresby Freeway in 1997, the road lobby had a more cunning strategy. Here there was and is a clear public transport alternative, the main components of which are a train extension to Rowville and a tram extension to Knox City. Independent estimates at the time put the cost of the entire public transport package at a fairly modest $240 million. However, when it became evident that the public transport alternative might have a better benefit-cost ratio than the freeway, the government planners had it removed from the list of options being considered. To kill it off once and for all they inflated the costings, so that the cost of the Rowville line alone went from the consultant's original estimate of $80 million up to $320 million!

Public transport projects can always be made to look expensive through 'gold-plated' costings like this one. Other examples of out-of-control costs include $98 million for two stations and 10 kilometres of electrification to Craigieburn (from an initial estimate of $30 million), and $40 million for the 1 kilometre tram extension from Mont Albert to Box Hill. These all help feed the related myth that rail lines cost more to build than freeways; as we explain on that page, Perth's new rail lines are being built for much less money, and for substantially less cost than freeways. The difference is that Perth's projects are being planned and managed by those with experience in railway building, while in Melbourne our engineers have little experience with anything other than roads. Our last significant new railway was the Glen Waverley line, completed in 1930!

Capacity Crisis? What Capacity Crisis?

Although this particular urban myth originated with the road lobby, its most recent sightings are in the frequent claims by the Department of Infrastructure and private operators that our urban rail system is 'at capacity' and cannot support additional peak services unless we spend billions of dollars building additional tracks. This has given rise to a spate of media stories expressing alarm that high petrol prices will spell the city's doom by tempting more motorists to use public transport, thereby 'crippling' the system!

When reading breathless claims like this it pays to remember that Melbourne's public transport system already has more tracks per head of population than almost any other in the world, yet at present caters for less than 10% of trips. The idea that such a system would be 'crippled' by more passengers (with its implied suggestion that we cannot afford to have people switch from cars to public transport, even if they wanted to) would not be taken seriously in places with well-run systems. But what makes this particularly risible is that the claims of a capacity crisis almost never focus on the real bottlenecks in the system, namely the remaining single-track sections on the Werribee, Epping, Hurstbridge, Lilydale and Belgrave lines, most of which are quite short and could be duplicated for relatively little cost. Instead the focus is on grandiose white elephants like a second City Loop or a third track to Dandenong, involving high costs but relatively little benefit (and none whatsoever outside peak hour).

To see why we don't have a capacity problem, even in peak hour, it suffices to examine the historical evidence. The map shown below was prepared for the 1929 Melbourne Town Plan, at a time when train patronage was higher than it is now, despite the population being smaller. Shown next to each line are the peak and off-peak train frequencies (for metro services only; some lines also carry country services but these are not counted in the frequencies shown).
Map of Melbourne rail system and frequencies in 1929

Map of Melbourne rail system and frequencies in 1929

Click to enlarge

A number of important facts can be read off this map. Note first that even in 1929 trains ran as frequently as every three minutes to Clifton Hill, Brighton Beach and Box Hill - all on double-track lines (the third track to Box Hill came much later). It is also evident from the difference between peak and off-peak frequencies that journeys were just as concentrated in peak periods as they are now (largely because most non-work journeys were made on foot or by bicycle). This refutes the argument that our supposed capacity problems stem from a need to carry more people in peak periods than in earlier times.

The frequencies shown on the map were those achievable with 1920s-vintage signalling and manual crossing gates. Since then, all lines have been upgraded with improved signalling (the last one was the Upfield line in 1997). This should allow trains to run better than every three minutes on all but the few remaining single-track sections, even if we can't quite achieve the 60-second headways of the London Underground or the 30-second headways of the Paris Metro.

Not only did trains run much more frequently in the past: they also carried many more passengers. Back in 1929, the Sandringham line carried 30 million passengers, a fact proudly noted in that year by Bradshaw's Guide to Victoria. This compares with just 6 million passengers in 1991, and around 10 million today. Even with recent patronage growth, the number of trips on the entire Melbourne train network (170 million) is less than six times the patronage on just one branch line in 1929.

Lest anyone think we're singling out the Sandringham line for special treatment, we can look at some system-wide figures. Based on the Connex figure above, Melburnians make on average about 45 train trips a year. In 1950 the equivalent figure was 157 train trips per person. Of course, the population in Melbourne was only 1.3 million in 1950 compared with some 3.6 million now, but that still means that in 1950 the rail system carried 204 million passengers - some 20 per cent more than it does now. And it did so without any of the infrastructure improvements that have been built since 1950, including the City Loop, the expansion from 6 to 10 platforms at Richmond, and quite a few third tracks (such as that between Caulfield and Moorabbin on the Frankston line, built in the 1970s).

Historical figures on journeys to work confirm the general findings. There has been a rebound in train patronage very recently, but the latest census still puts the number of commuters below the levels seen in the postwar era.

In short, if the rail system in 1950 could carry half a million passengers a day and 150,000 in peak hours without any of the extra tracks built since that time, we should be able to do much, much better today. Instead, we have private operators telling us via news reports that

Beneficial as the underground loop and other rail improvements have been, what such statements really betray is how much management expertise has been lost to Melbourne's public transport system in its half-century of decline. The loop itself was originally planned on the basis that CBD trips by train would double, and require 181 incoming suburban trains between 8am and 9am, compared with 108 peak hour trains in 1964 and 116 trains in 1929. Even leaving out the now-defunct St Kilda and Port Melbourne lines, the projected capacity with the loop in place was at least 153 trains per hour, compared with 94 in 1964 - plus the capacity for expansion beyond the design year.

Yet in 2005 when the above statements about capacity were made, Connex timetables showed 87 incoming trains between 8am and 9am, which was even less than in 1964. New timetables have restored something close to the 1964 level of service, with 96 incoming trains. Even if we add in the V/Line services boosted by the 'Regional Fast Rail' project, the total number of suburban plus country trains (112) in the busiest hour of the peak today is only 73% of the projected capacity for suburban trains in 1969.

As the table below shows, not only are we failing to use a substantial portion of the city loop's planned capacity; some individual lines that are said to be 'at capacity' are still running fewer trains than before the loop was built!

(Source: Melbourne Transportation Plan, 1969. Connex and V/Line timetables, effective October 2005 and April 2008. V/Line arrivals are counted at Southern Cross. '+' indicates projections are ambiguous and may be higher than stated.)

The bottom line is that only the Glen Waverley and Sydenham lines are currently running at the capacity the 1960s rail engineers had in mind when they designed the city loop. (And in the latter case, we have to count some V/Line services as de facto suburban trains.) All other lines feeding the city loop are falling short of capacity, some of them well short. Part of the reason for the apparent 'CBD capacity crisis' is that operators now insist on running nearly every train through the loop, rather than running half the trains directly to Flinders Street as was originally planned. This by itself wastes about one-third of the real capacity available.

Of course, capacity constraints aren't only claimed for the city loop: individual suburban lines are also said to be suffering from capacity constraints. The reason has to do with express running. Expresses have been used on Melbourne's train network since the 19th century, and Bradshaw's assures us that peak-hour expresses were certainly used on the Sandringham line in 1929. But as soon as one mixes express trains and stopping trains on the same track, extra space has to be allowed in front of the express train, otherwise it catches up with the stopping train and gets slowed down.

The map above shows that even with expresses, the Sandringham line managed 3-minute frequencies in 1929. But the Dandenong line is longer than the Sandringham line, hence the ongoing claims that this line can't sustain a mixture of express and stopping trains at nearly the same capacity without a separate track for the express trains.

However, the reduction in capacity depends on how long the express runs are. An express run from Caulfield to Oakleigh shortens travel time by three minutes, so requires an additional three-minute gap between it and the previous stopping train. An express run from Caulfield to Dandenong, on the other hand, requires an eleven-minute gap. If such 'super expresses' were commonplace, it would be impossible, without a third track, to maintain a high frequency while also serving intermediate destinations.

There are, however, many ways of arranging train stopping patterns so that passengers benefit from express running but capacity is not jeopardised. In Perth, for example, trains on the Northern Suburbs line alternate between two different express patterns, which together ensure that all stations are covered. There are 16 trains per hour on the Northern Suburbs line (compared with the Dandenong line's 'congested' 11 trains per hour), and planners there are confident that even more capacity is available. Building entire new tracks is just one of many possible ways to fit in more trains, incurring the highest cost but requiring the least planning effort.

In a 2005 textbook, transport planner Vukan Vuchic notes that three-track lines are rare internationally because they offer little flexibility relative to their cost. The scheduling methods described in this same textbook can be applied to the Dandenong line to achieve capacities of 20 trains per hour, close to the theoretical maximum of 24 per hour allowed by Melbourne's signalling system.

However one looks at it, the supposed capacity shortage is revealed to be a management problem, not an infrastructure problem.

In conclusion, if there really is money available to spend on new tracks, the priority should be

Once the real bottlenecks have been fixed it may then be appropriate to consider additional tracks for 'super expresses', which are in any case only useful in peak hour and then only for central-city commuters. Needless to say, all of this should be undertaken by competent and skilled planners, every one of whom is worth more than their weight in gold-plated steel rails.

© 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

Common Urban Myths About Transport

Capacity Crisis? What Capacity Crisis?