I live in Strathtulloh. I sit in the traffic on the Western Freeway every single morning. So when Big Build Roads dropped its “What You’ve Said Summary Report” for the Melton-Caroline Springs upgrade corridor and led with a 99% community support rate, I felt the temptation to cheer.
I’m not going to cheer.
A 99% support rate for road widening doesn’t demonstrate democratic consensus. It demonstrates a population with no alternatives left. When you build a massive outer-suburban estate with zero local employment, zero walkable retail, and bus services running every 40 minutes to a station that’s already at capacity, you’ve engineered the outcome. People aren’t voting for more asphalt because they love cars. They’re voting for more asphalt because the system stripped everything else away.
The consultation data spells out exactly how this closed loop works.
28% of commuter delays happen before drivers even reach the freeway, trapped on local feeder roads trying to access the network. The Ferris Road overpass is a single-lane bottleneck on a corridor serving tens of thousands of dwellings. Meanwhile, 66% of respondents rated the existing walking and cycling infrastructure as poor or very poor. The response to that isn’t to invest in walking and cycling: public transport priority facilities ranked at 8% in planning priority, active transport at 7%.
People stopped asking for better options because they stopped believing better options were coming.
The community feedback calls for emergency fixes: a second Ferris Road overpass, a new diamond interchange at Mt Cottrell Road, additional lanes in both directions. These aren’t unreasonable demands. They’re the logical response of people losing 30-plus minutes every morning to a chokepoint the state knew was coming when it approved the estates upstream.
But here’s the mechanism nobody’s planning around: expand the road, and you expand the signal for more sprawl. New capacity fills. Denser estates get approved because the freeway can “handle it.” Within a few years the identical bottleneck reappears 5 kilometres further west. The corridor gets another upgrade. The cycle repeats.
Induced demand isn’t a theory. It’s what the last three decades of Melbourne freeway expansion have demonstrated, repeatedly, in the same western suburbs now calling for more lanes.
Near-term capacity fixes are still necessary. Duplicating the Ferris Road overpass is necessary. I’m not arguing against that, partly because I’d benefit directly, mostly because it’s the right call regardless. But it needs to be paired with things the state currently has no intention of doing:
High-frequency bus corridors with actual dedicated lanes into Cobblebank and Melton stations, running often enough that missing one doesn’t cost you 40 minutes. Zoning amendments mandating mixed-use commercial and retail inside residential estates, so residents can complete daily errands without a car trip. Active transport links that are physically separated from high-speed traffic, built to a standard people would actually use rather than a standard that ticks a box.
None of this is radical. It’s what a planning system that cared about long-term function would have required before the estates were approved.
This report is being framed as a mandate. It’s actually a confession: a planning regime so car-dependent it manufactured the very demand it’s now being asked to serve.
The Ferris Road duplication needs to happen. The Mt Cottrell interchange needs to happen. And without zoning reform and genuine transit investment, those fixes will buy us five years before we’re having the identical conversation about the next chokepoint in the next estate built without a single mixed-use requirement.
I’ve lodged formal questions to Melton City Council demanding a timeline for the overpass duplication and a commitment to planning scheme amendments. Submissions are at fusionparty.org.au/submissions_and_reports.
The report is not a milestone. It’s a symptom report on the planning regime that produced it.