What I've done here is take the employment "heat map" on page 36 of the document and plonk it into Google Earth, to create this ... I've had to chop Frankston off these maps for display's sake, but it is included in the plan.

One thing I believe we can learn from all human history is that networking complex systems reaps exponential benefits. I believe Paul Mees was right to make networking an important locus of his transport planning work for this reason.

Melbourne Employment Densities and Centres with tram/rail networks

The network terminates just south of the major Roxburgh Park employment hub, with the Cragieburn line essentially missing the actual employment center

The network provides no connectivity to the Knoxfield/Rowville employment hub

The network provides no connectivity to the Airport/Keilor employment hub

The network provides no connectivity to the Chadstone employment/retail hub

The network provides no connectivity to the Doncaster employment/retail hub

The network provides no connectivity to the Laverton employment hub

The network is poorly geographically optimised to cater for most of the large Monash/Clayton, Moorabbin and to a lesser extent Braeside hubs

Plan Wombat Refresh - Heavy Rail Projects

MAXIMISE the connectivity of suburban CADs

MAXIMISE the potential of rail catchments to operate radially into those centers

Provide new heavy rail coverage to existing major rail blackspots

Eastern Outer Orbital - Option A

Eastern Outer Orbital - Option B

Eastern Outer Orbital - Option C

Eastern Outer Orbital - Option D



MAXIMISE the connectivity of suburban CADs

MAXIMISE the potential of rail catchments to operate radially into those centers

Provide new heavy rail coverage to existing major rail blackspots





Add the heavy rail network to the picture, and we can begin to use it to identify the biggest gaps between the service the network provides and the actual transport needs Melburnians are expressing. One would like to have seen such a "needs/gap analysis" take far more primacy in all this grand planning from IV and Planning.Some of my own wombat sniffings:It's interesting too that where we think of 'Bradmeadows' as being the employment hub, the jobs are all actually just north of Broady proper in more like Roxburgh Park.And of course, the network is as per my broken record, poorly designed to provide radial travel in to most of these employment hubs other than the CBD.We can do better than this.So to recap from the previous Plan W . we are trying to achieve the following:And here's how I think that's best done.This is such a no-brainer. Because the rail reservation exists, and it's only 2kms of single track - though this needs duplicating already. Again, this is a massive existing employment center and currently unserviced by rail. So extending the Upfield Line to re-join Craigieburn should actually be the highest cost-benefit network expansion that PTV have on the table right now, and with this week's announcement of further land releases out North along Craigieburn, this element of PTV's existing Network Development Plan (NDP) surely warrants fast-tracking. No pun intended.But of course this is in the NDP not because we've left a massive employment center unserviced by rail for thirty years, but rather because there will soon be CBD-bound commuters on the other side of it. Melbourne's radial mindset really does seem to have hampered our planning in so many myriad ways. In Sydney, heavy rail exists to get you to work. In Melbourne, it exists to get you to the CBD.This is something like what it should look like. The only dramatic change from what regular readers will have seen before is the doglegs via Roxburgh Park and West Heidelberg.The other obvious option here is to run Donaster - Box Hill instead. To a large extent that choice would be informed by what choices were made for Stage Two below.I favour Ringwood as a higher future potential location than Box Hill because of the tremendous rail catchment we'd be creating by doing this. It's the only hub where we can create the "four spokes" effect by adding just one new spoke. There's very little office or industrial stock around the station already, but oodles of potential. This, I think is where we build our "Parramatta" rather than Box Hill, albeit that BH has similar natural factors favouring it IF we built an option of orbital rail that took us there.So, the services would runMetro style service, ideally smaller capacity, higher frequency, possibly driverless.Probably luggage-capacity modified three car sets of existing rolling stock types.There would also be the option of creating the triangular junction shown at the airport to allow another less frequent SXS-Ringwood service, but probably less so if you'd be mixing rolling stock, and it's unclear there'd really be a demand or need for it.The Southern Cross route MUST stop at commuter stations along the electrified Albion freight corridor because that runs through one of the largest existing heavy rail blackspots in Melbourne.I don't intend to get bogged down here in construction detail. I've given some thought to how much of this could be done with combined tunnel/skyrail, where your skyrail could be plonked say down the middle of an existing traffic sewer like Springvale Rd, but I'd rather save all the issues around that for a future post.The section Doncaster-Airport is 38.4 kms of what would need to be mostly tunnel. Doncaster-Ringwood is 9.5 kms, Doncaster-Box Hill 3 kms.Plugging that into our very back of the envelope calculation from the previous plan, this would cost approximately$14.37bn (Ringwood)/$12.42bn (Box Hill) at Swiss rates $24.45/20.7bn at Sydney Metro rates, and abut three times that at Melbourne Metro ratesThe electrification of the Albion corridor was costed by the Liberals at around $2bn.None of these calculations include expenses for new stations or rolling stock.So, we have a few options here. One would be not doing a stage two at all. In my next post I will look at alternatives to this entire stage via light rather than heavy rail, so let's set that aside for now.Option one would run Donaster-Moorabin like this ...Or, you could instead take the more suburban via Ringwood to Braeside, or you could do BOTH ...Or maybe we think the expense for Dandenong and Braeside is limited, in which case this is another option, although by the same principle as above, we're creating Melbourne's only "five spoke" employment hub in Dandy by including it ...Or if you really were about the maximal network effect, this is building ALL the options ...Expense-wise, Doncaster-Moorabbin is 28.2 kms, Ringwood-Braeside 30.5 kms, and Ringwood-Moorabbin 28.5 kms. So the cost would likely be north of $10bn for any of these options.My inclination would be to build option B above in two stages, with Clayton coming first because of identified need. But all this would be dependent on how much of this you thought could be achieved by a tram/light rail solution. Which just fortunately I've also turned my noggin to recently. But more on that in the next post.The plan at this stage leaves open the question of how best to deal with the Laverton blackspot. The obvious solution is an extension of the orbital rail to the west, but you then start to have issues with mixed rolling stock as the metro stock is only intended to run to the airport under the plan as I conceive of it.An important footnote too, to be fair to Plan Melbourne's authors, it is possible that many of the omitted employment hubs were deemed problematic because these heavy industrial areas are quite dispersed in terms of employment destinations, and thus difficult to provide public transport solutions into and to create actual activity centers within. But some data on that, or some indication of the thinking/planning here would have been a bit more reassuring to see.So to recap our goals again ...How do you think I did? Could you do it better? I'd love to hear some commentary/discussion here.