Brooklyn resident Gulen Sarantis, with her two-year-old Georgia, has concerns over the 7000 extra trucks that will hit Millers Road. Credit:Jason South Brooklyn is bordered to the east by busy Millers Road – already choked with at least 3600 trucks a day. The residents of Brooklyn's 800 homes already find it hard to drive onto Millers Road. When the West Gate Tunnel is built, the Andrews government predicts another 7000 trucks a day will swamp the road, as a result of truck bans in Yarraville and freight drivers avoiding tolls on Transurban's new motorway. "It's near impossible to cross Millers Road as it is," says Caroline Kennon, whose family moved to Brooklyn four years ago after being priced out of Seddon. Ms Kennon said the family moved to Brooklyn after researching the suburb thoroughly.

Transurban chief Scott Charlton will appear before a Victorian parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday night. Credit:Louise Kennerley She was encouraged by the action of the residents' group, and the steps taken to clean up pollution problems. "This is such a huge step backwards – especially since there is a primary school 80 metres from Millers Road." A spaghetti junction to be built in West Melbourne as part of the West Gate Tunnel project. Credit:Western Distributor Authority

The kindergartens and other primary schools that serve the suburb are to the south in Altona – meaning parents drive their children via Millers Road. "A lot of the older people in our suburb just don't drive that way; it's really dangerous," Ms Kennon said. Brooklyn's large blocks of land recently saw it record its first sale above $1 million – ironically on Millers Road. The heads of both toll road operator Transurban and the government's authority in charge of the project have been summoned to a parliamentary inquiry into the project on Wednesday. They will be grilled about the impacts on suburbs like Brooklyn by the west's Greens MP Colleen Hartland, who has been heavily involved in the fight to rid Yarraville of trucks.

"The government should have a proper state transport plan rather than just these ad hoc plans that only benefit Transurban and hurt residents," she said. A spokeswoman for the government's authority handling the project said the West Gate Tunnel would provide a more direct and efficient freight route from the west to the Port of Melbourne, and improve "liveability" in the west. "This is about getting a balance between community and the local industry in Brooklyn and Tottenham," she said. Gulen Sarantis moved to Brooklyn three years ago and loves the area. "It is quiet, all families and this little lovely pocket," she said. But the already difficult problem of getting onto Millers Road was going to get worse, she said, when the new tollway was built.

"We sometimes have to wait three or four minutes just to get out, and a big part of it is already trucks," she said. Ash Ellawala is another resident from the Brooklyn Community Group, who said the trucks that will swamp the arterial roads around the suburb will create noise and pollution issues. "The truck bans on Yarraville streets, they are forcing all of the trucks onto Millers Road," he said, demanding that the Westgate Freeway be tolled for trucks until further out on Grieve Parade, which only runs through an industrial area. Hobsons Bay mayor Sandra Wilson lives in nearby Altona Meadows and her council ward takes in Brooklyn. She said air pollution and odour problems had subsided since the Environment Protection Authority clamped down on industries neighbouring residential Brooklyn. She said the suburb had "endured so much over the years" and was still one of the worst pollution hot-spots in Australia.

"[Yarraville residents] have been pushing for their truck problem to be solved, and good on them for lobbying for their cause," she said. But their success must not come at Hobsons Bay's expense, she said. Cr Wilson said there needed to be better detailed origin and destination transport studies done to understand precisely how badly Brooklyn would be hurt and how shifting tolling points might help. She said while she didn't understand the motivation for tolling points not covering Millers Road, "I imagine it's for Transurban to make more money".