Transport

Our arterial road corridors are critical connections between our communities, activity centres and employment precincts.

These roads are not suitable for the existing high volume of traffic. They are of a rural standard with unsealed shoulders, open drains and non-existent bike and pedestrian facilities.

With rapid employment and residential growth, roads that are already unsuitable will only deteriorate further.

Fast-tracking infrastructure projects including the Western Highway, Melton Highway, Hopkins and Christies Roads, and the Robinsons Road, Westwood Drive and Calder Park Drive corridor is urgently needed to service key employment precincts including Horizon 3023, Melbourne Business Park and Cobblebank MAC.

Independent cost benefit analysis by Clarity Consult demonstrates that these projects stack up.

Delivering them will attract increased commercial investment, support 73,000 future jobs and provide a range of economic benefits.

For more information visit: Moving Melton 

The City of Melton needs a more frequent, direct and better-connected bus network. More than 40,000 people living in new suburbs have no bus services. This will get much worse with 13,000 existing lots and 8,600 new lots being created.

Where there are existing bus services, peak frequency is more than 30 minutes and services are indirect, with travel time often close to twice that of travelling by car.

There are approximately 300,000 transport trips per day originating from the Melton LGA, with approximately 3,800 trips by bus – less than 1.3 percent mode share.

We are calling for a review of our bus network to refine existing routes to create more frequent and direct routes.

Our modelling has found that a no cost review of the bus services could double the frequency of buses, resulting in a 100 per cent increase in services for existing routes and create new routes that would connect areas not serviced by bus.

For more information visit: Moving Melton 

The growing suburbs along the Melton rail line are serviced by diesel trains from the overcrowded regional Ballarat services.

Extension of the electrified rail network from Sunshine to Melton and separation from the Ballarat line would triple the passenger capacity and improve frequency.

Metropolitan trains can carry up to 1,500 passengers at a time and can operate at increased frequency. Over the next 30 years 183,500 people will move into the railway line corridor, and six new suburbs that are directly aligned to the rail line will bring 65,900 new dwellings.

The existing rail network will not cope with this increase in population. Independent analysis by Clarity Consult found that electrification and separation of the Melton Line would see a Present Value of Benefits of $910 million over 30 years.

We are also calling for new stations at Mt Atkinson, Thornhill Park and Calder Park.

The upgrade of the rail network and construction of new stations would divert traffic from surrounding roads, reducing congestion and will embed more affordable, healthy and sustainable transport practices in our community.

For more information visit: Moving Melton 

The City of Melton has some of the poorest active transport connections of any municipality. Many new estates have no active transport connections and there are large gaps in the network.

Research shows that a safe active transport network is the key to attracting people to activities such as walking or cycling as a way to get around.

Investing in active transport will reduce the number of vehicles on our roads and will help our community adopt more affordable, healthy and sustainable travel.

We have identified 90 km of missing paths to be prioritised by Council, 120 km of shared path network on major roads to be delivered by the Victorian Government and 240 km of developer delivered paths managed through permit applications.

For more information visit: Moving Melton