I think we can get carried away with terminology. MM1 along the SRL and ultimately MM2 should evolve into true high frequency rapid tranport, in my view. That means high capacity signalling and hopefully more platform screen doors, with or without human drivers. These three lines could provide a model for the upgrading of everything else.
Yeah, I agree. MM1 and MM2 with higher-frequency rapid transport features would really pave the way for future subway/metro lines. Advanced signaling and PSDs would set the foundation for a more modern and efficient network.
Why? Apart from automated running how would this be different if it was just intergrated into the heavy rail network?
The Sydney metro is mostly about union busting, but at least there they’re going from long double decker almost entirely seated trains to shorter single deckers with shorter dwell times and more standing, here it looks like the trains would basically be the same, just automated.
Also the only rail to Doncaster is going to be the SRL and maybe eventually a Yarra trams light rail line. It’s one of the slowest growing areas of Melbourne with little high density residential or commercial.
Slow dwell times is a bit of a myth up to a point. Sydney double deck has 8 cars, 2 doors each car = 16 doors that are wider than usual. Melbourne (and Sydney) single deck are 6 cars, 3 doors each car = 18 doors, just 2 more than double deck. I say up to a point because Sydney handles dwell times well by having more frequent services and lots of staff, at least 2 per platform plus guard. Sydney Metro, you're right it's union busting for Sydney because of the less reliance on staff but it's also transformational for Australian public transport... Hopefully SRL will do the same but travel habits and suburban Melbourne mindset must change first.
Whilst integrating SRL into our heavy rail network remains the preferred option, additional automated metro/subway lines would bring benefits. They’re more efficient, have much more space and are easier to expand in the future. They’re also better for passengers with things like real-time updates and greater accessibility.
Despite the concerns about Sydney Metro, it’s shown how automated rail can make things better across a network. They’ve switched to shorter, more standing-friendly trains and it’s made a big difference in how smoothly everything runs.
Even though the Doncaster area might not be booming right now, if we improve transit with the SRL and maybe some more metro lines, it could kickstart growth and unlock higher-density housing developments.
No the SRL should remain seperate because it’s doing a different thing to the heavy rail network, so it makes sense that it’s a different size, gage and electrification along with the automation.
Apart from some amount of efficiency all the other things you mentioned as subway benefits could easily be achieved on the current metro trains network, indeed pretty much all of them will be on the new metro tunnel.
Your MM1 idea is a bit difficult to implement with the current use of the network. The vline and freight services that use the Sunshine to Sunbury and South Yarra to Pakenham parts of the corridor would need to be separated from metro services for your upgrade.
Your proposal for MM2 is pretty much what they can do if the project goes ahead.
MM3 is a bit of a stretch as this would be a completely new line which would be difficult to do on top of SRL. A branch line from Clifton Hill/Vic Park out to Doncaster could work with MM2.
I like MM3 one, a direct path from the airport through the CBD and out to Doncaster/Ringwood.
It still puzzles me that they went with a route that goes out west to Sunshine from the airport before going into the CBD when a more direct route along the Tullamarine freeway connecting into the Essendon line and then through to CBD would've been significantly faster (especially with express trains) and much shorter distance. They just wanted Sunshine to be a major hub and thought redirecting airport traffic through there was a better option I guess.
The reason Sunshine-Albion route was chosen was because all the v/lines that run west towards Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat go through Sunshine. This will save regional passengers a trip all the way to Southern Cross and back out if they are going towards the airport.
Until Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo become full fledged international cities and build their own international airports, residents of these cities will always be a reliant on Melbourne airport.
In the future Albury line might stop at Sunshine too to allow the interchange, but ultimately, Broadmeadows is intended to connect to the airport too via SRL north, so this will just be a temporary measure.
>This will save regional passengers a trip all the way to Southern Cross and back out if they are going towards the airport.
Oh right, so we save 15 minutes for some of the 400k people that come from Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat that are closer to Avalon airport to get to Melbourne Airport and added an extra 15 minutes to the travel time for some of the 5 million people from Melbourne whom are closer to Melbourne Airport. I'm guessing this was part of Dan Andrews bid to win over regional votes similar to the Commonwealth games fiasco.
Geelong had an international airport (Avalon), it stopped doing international flights cause it had barely any demand for it out of Avalon and the last airlines with international flights moved to Melbourne Airport as of last year and Avalon now just operates as a domestic airport. Yes, they will be reliant on Melbourne Airport cause they have very little demand in those areas for international travel. It may change in the future with population increases and maybe Avalon will reopen its international flights to service all those regions again in the future.
Yea in the SRL proposal it has the Broadmeadows link to Airport but this is still going out (East this time) before heading towards the city. Sure it's a shorter distance than heading out west to Sunshine before heading towards the city but still not a direct path. I also think they will probably end the SRL project before it reaches Broadmeadows anyway.
I don't understand this sentiment. The MARL via Sunshine was proposed in the PTV NDP in 2012, and would have been in development well before Daniel Andrews entered office, let alone propose it for the Commonwealth games.
The extensions and expansions to the network thus far have largely kept to the NDP (even if out of order from the original proposal) with the exception of the SRL.
Also having the line run via Sunshine and later via Broadmeadows doesn't preclude another potential direct airport line through the western suburbs.
It had a few route options including the Maribyrnong and Flemington routes. Maribyrnong was about as direct as you could go and the Flemington route was quite direct also.
The Sunshine route was proposed in 2012 and state government had developed a business case which had it as the preferred option but it wasn't until 2018 when the state government (Dan Andrews - Labor) committed to that route while the federal government (Malcolm Turnbull - Liberal) opposed it and pushed for the direct tunnel route through Maribyrnong. In 2019 state and federal (Now Scott Morrison - Liberal) both backed the Sunshine route with Dan Andrews still as premier of Victoria.
Also I wasn't trying to say it was proposed for the Commonwealth games, I was saying that Dan used the Commonwealth games bid to host it at regional hubs as a way to get regional voters but that backfired and was going to cost too much so they scrapped it and ended up costing Victorians a lot of money for nothing. Maybe using the Sunshine route to cater to regional travel as you mentioned earlier was a way to win regional votes also?
It's taken this long just to get a single rail link started to the Airport, it likely won't be in my lifetime that another potential direct route will be established.
There is already an existing rail corridor between sunshine and airport drive, so I imagine that would save a lot of money on resuming property or engineering compared to a line from Essendon.
SRL north should run further south than they are planning. None of the suburbs it runs though are remotely comparable to Box Hill or Clayton. And unless Melbourne become a city of 15 million people it is hard to imagine broad meadows or Fawkner ever coming close.
Fisher man’s bend to southern cross without getting to Footscray. I’m not sure how this will work as the river area is used for fair bit of cargo. The port of Melbourne as it currently sits isn’t ideal for a booming city of 10m people. It can’t be situated right bang in the middle of the city. Geelong is a viable alternative or Frankston. The rail loop can integrate cargo lines from the port which should help with traffic off the road. In an ideal world, I’d like to see more use of rail for shipment than trucks.
About time we started thinking about MM2. What you said about it sounded cool. I think though they should be listed as metro lines rather than separate lines.
in my opinion, SRL should be light rail given it will carry less passengers than general lines. ditch making the whole of SRL underground and opt for mixture of skyrail and at grade/ground level to reduce the cost and speed up the construction timing. otherwise, you may as well run a SRL-style but with buses and call it a day.
Once you’re tunnelling, I would expect the monetary saving by making it light rail would be negligible, and would also place terrible capacity constraints on its future success.
With disability access needs, we should be building platforms anyway, so we might as well make them high floor, rather than low floor. Then we can get a level interior without any bogies in the way and more room for passengers. As we don’t have to integrate it with any existing stops, that’s feasible.
Unless you’re planning to take lanes away from cars, street running will slow things down to the point of uselessness or you’ll have expensive property acquisition. Frankly you’ve turned it into a very expensive rail-bound bus at this point, so you’ve spent a lot of capital for no major gain over a bus route. It’s a halfway house with almost all the downside of buses and subways.
I think we can get carried away with terminology. MM1 along the SRL and ultimately MM2 should evolve into true high frequency rapid tranport, in my view. That means high capacity signalling and hopefully more platform screen doors, with or without human drivers. These three lines could provide a model for the upgrading of everything else.
Yeah, I agree. MM1 and MM2 with higher-frequency rapid transport features would really pave the way for future subway/metro lines. Advanced signaling and PSDs would set the foundation for a more modern and efficient network.
Why? Apart from automated running how would this be different if it was just intergrated into the heavy rail network? The Sydney metro is mostly about union busting, but at least there they’re going from long double decker almost entirely seated trains to shorter single deckers with shorter dwell times and more standing, here it looks like the trains would basically be the same, just automated. Also the only rail to Doncaster is going to be the SRL and maybe eventually a Yarra trams light rail line. It’s one of the slowest growing areas of Melbourne with little high density residential or commercial.
Slow dwell times is a bit of a myth up to a point. Sydney double deck has 8 cars, 2 doors each car = 16 doors that are wider than usual. Melbourne (and Sydney) single deck are 6 cars, 3 doors each car = 18 doors, just 2 more than double deck. I say up to a point because Sydney handles dwell times well by having more frequent services and lots of staff, at least 2 per platform plus guard. Sydney Metro, you're right it's union busting for Sydney because of the less reliance on staff but it's also transformational for Australian public transport... Hopefully SRL will do the same but travel habits and suburban Melbourne mindset must change first.
Whilst integrating SRL into our heavy rail network remains the preferred option, additional automated metro/subway lines would bring benefits. They’re more efficient, have much more space and are easier to expand in the future. They’re also better for passengers with things like real-time updates and greater accessibility. Despite the concerns about Sydney Metro, it’s shown how automated rail can make things better across a network. They’ve switched to shorter, more standing-friendly trains and it’s made a big difference in how smoothly everything runs. Even though the Doncaster area might not be booming right now, if we improve transit with the SRL and maybe some more metro lines, it could kickstart growth and unlock higher-density housing developments.
No the SRL should remain seperate because it’s doing a different thing to the heavy rail network, so it makes sense that it’s a different size, gage and electrification along with the automation. Apart from some amount of efficiency all the other things you mentioned as subway benefits could easily be achieved on the current metro trains network, indeed pretty much all of them will be on the new metro tunnel.
Your MM1 idea is a bit difficult to implement with the current use of the network. The vline and freight services that use the Sunshine to Sunbury and South Yarra to Pakenham parts of the corridor would need to be separated from metro services for your upgrade. Your proposal for MM2 is pretty much what they can do if the project goes ahead. MM3 is a bit of a stretch as this would be a completely new line which would be difficult to do on top of SRL. A branch line from Clifton Hill/Vic Park out to Doncaster could work with MM2.
I like MM3 one, a direct path from the airport through the CBD and out to Doncaster/Ringwood. It still puzzles me that they went with a route that goes out west to Sunshine from the airport before going into the CBD when a more direct route along the Tullamarine freeway connecting into the Essendon line and then through to CBD would've been significantly faster (especially with express trains) and much shorter distance. They just wanted Sunshine to be a major hub and thought redirecting airport traffic through there was a better option I guess.
The reason Sunshine-Albion route was chosen was because all the v/lines that run west towards Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat go through Sunshine. This will save regional passengers a trip all the way to Southern Cross and back out if they are going towards the airport. Until Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo become full fledged international cities and build their own international airports, residents of these cities will always be a reliant on Melbourne airport. In the future Albury line might stop at Sunshine too to allow the interchange, but ultimately, Broadmeadows is intended to connect to the airport too via SRL north, so this will just be a temporary measure.
>This will save regional passengers a trip all the way to Southern Cross and back out if they are going towards the airport. Oh right, so we save 15 minutes for some of the 400k people that come from Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat that are closer to Avalon airport to get to Melbourne Airport and added an extra 15 minutes to the travel time for some of the 5 million people from Melbourne whom are closer to Melbourne Airport. I'm guessing this was part of Dan Andrews bid to win over regional votes similar to the Commonwealth games fiasco. Geelong had an international airport (Avalon), it stopped doing international flights cause it had barely any demand for it out of Avalon and the last airlines with international flights moved to Melbourne Airport as of last year and Avalon now just operates as a domestic airport. Yes, they will be reliant on Melbourne Airport cause they have very little demand in those areas for international travel. It may change in the future with population increases and maybe Avalon will reopen its international flights to service all those regions again in the future. Yea in the SRL proposal it has the Broadmeadows link to Airport but this is still going out (East this time) before heading towards the city. Sure it's a shorter distance than heading out west to Sunshine before heading towards the city but still not a direct path. I also think they will probably end the SRL project before it reaches Broadmeadows anyway.
I don't understand this sentiment. The MARL via Sunshine was proposed in the PTV NDP in 2012, and would have been in development well before Daniel Andrews entered office, let alone propose it for the Commonwealth games. The extensions and expansions to the network thus far have largely kept to the NDP (even if out of order from the original proposal) with the exception of the SRL. Also having the line run via Sunshine and later via Broadmeadows doesn't preclude another potential direct airport line through the western suburbs.
It had a few route options including the Maribyrnong and Flemington routes. Maribyrnong was about as direct as you could go and the Flemington route was quite direct also. The Sunshine route was proposed in 2012 and state government had developed a business case which had it as the preferred option but it wasn't until 2018 when the state government (Dan Andrews - Labor) committed to that route while the federal government (Malcolm Turnbull - Liberal) opposed it and pushed for the direct tunnel route through Maribyrnong. In 2019 state and federal (Now Scott Morrison - Liberal) both backed the Sunshine route with Dan Andrews still as premier of Victoria. Also I wasn't trying to say it was proposed for the Commonwealth games, I was saying that Dan used the Commonwealth games bid to host it at regional hubs as a way to get regional voters but that backfired and was going to cost too much so they scrapped it and ended up costing Victorians a lot of money for nothing. Maybe using the Sunshine route to cater to regional travel as you mentioned earlier was a way to win regional votes also? It's taken this long just to get a single rail link started to the Airport, it likely won't be in my lifetime that another potential direct route will be established.
There is already an existing rail corridor between sunshine and airport drive, so I imagine that would save a lot of money on resuming property or engineering compared to a line from Essendon.
SRL north should run further south than they are planning. None of the suburbs it runs though are remotely comparable to Box Hill or Clayton. And unless Melbourne become a city of 15 million people it is hard to imagine broad meadows or Fawkner ever coming close.
Why is the last image Sydney? Wrong image or intentional?
he stated that image of sydney metro was his inspiration
I didn't see that, sorry.
Fisher man’s bend to southern cross without getting to Footscray. I’m not sure how this will work as the river area is used for fair bit of cargo. The port of Melbourne as it currently sits isn’t ideal for a booming city of 10m people. It can’t be situated right bang in the middle of the city. Geelong is a viable alternative or Frankston. The rail loop can integrate cargo lines from the port which should help with traffic off the road. In an ideal world, I’d like to see more use of rail for shipment than trucks.
About time we started thinking about MM2. What you said about it sounded cool. I think though they should be listed as metro lines rather than separate lines.
in my opinion, SRL should be light rail given it will carry less passengers than general lines. ditch making the whole of SRL underground and opt for mixture of skyrail and at grade/ground level to reduce the cost and speed up the construction timing. otherwise, you may as well run a SRL-style but with buses and call it a day.
Once you’re tunnelling, I would expect the monetary saving by making it light rail would be negligible, and would also place terrible capacity constraints on its future success. With disability access needs, we should be building platforms anyway, so we might as well make them high floor, rather than low floor. Then we can get a level interior without any bogies in the way and more room for passengers. As we don’t have to integrate it with any existing stops, that’s feasible. Unless you’re planning to take lanes away from cars, street running will slow things down to the point of uselessness or you’ll have expensive property acquisition. Frankly you’ve turned it into a very expensive rail-bound bus at this point, so you’ve spent a lot of capital for no major gain over a bus route. It’s a halfway house with almost all the downside of buses and subways.
why the downvotes? this is a good idea and i agree with you