Loading Among those extra features is a “bus way” – separated bus lanes – to cost around half a billion dollars that are designed to increase public transport services on the freeway. The Victorian Transport Action Group, an independent forum of transport experts that counts among its numbers former senior public servants and high-ranking political staffers, has made a submission on the bus plan to the government’s environmental assessment of the road. It finds the bus lanes have not been properly thought through and may not help increase the number of bus services now using the freeway. This is because not enough new major bus interchanges are planned, because buses will be forced into car traffic for a time on the Eastern Freeway, and because there is no new road space being created on Hoddle Street for buses.

Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video There are already 430 buses a day running into the city along the Eastern Freeway, and exiting at Hoddle Street. Estimates from 2015 showed they carried about 26,000 passengers a day. When the new bus way is complete, it will not be “fully segregated” as the government has claimed. Instead, the government’s own plans showed buses were to “mix with general traffic for about 1.5 kilometres east of Hoddle Street”, the submission found. “This will be a major drag on its performance,” the submission said. It also argued that the proposed “bus way” would “fail to achieve its primary goals unless the bus priority lanes from Victoria Park to the city are dramatically upgraded to eliminate delays”.

And the submission found that, once the bus lanes were built, any hope of a future rail line to Doncaster – whether heavy rail or light rail – was unrealistic. The government has argued that a future rail line is not made impossible by creation of dedicated bus lanes, but the Victorian Transport Action Group submission found this was “false hope”. “Once the ‘bus way’ option proceeds it effectively permanently rules out a later conversion,” the submission found, because retro-fitting light or heavy rail on the bus lanes would be “prohibitively expensive”. And the disruption to build a rail line would be too great, because it would require “effectively closing the ‘bus way’ for two years after it had built up a patronage level that couldn’t operate on the freeway”. The submission also points out that there is no real transport plan for Melbourne. As a result, the North East Link and its bus lanes were being planned in a silo, without reference to the $50 billion Suburban Rail Loop – despite its direct impact on the same transport corridor.

Loading A spokeswoman for the North East Link project authority, Jennifer Howard, said submissions like the Victorian Transport Action Group's would “help challenge and build on the solid work done to get the Environment Effect Statement out to the community”. Environmental hearings on the planned road begin next month, and Ms Howard said this process would highlight input from landowners, the community and groups like the Victorian Transport Action Group, "and the work done by North East Link and its specialists”. She said the express bus lanes were the most effective way to improve the frequency and reliability of public transport services in the area while catering to growing demand. The 26-kilometre North East Link, set to carry 135,000 vehicles daily, is designed to fill in a ‘missing link’ in Melbourne’s ring road, and take thousands of trucks off congested arterial roads in the north-east.