Melbourne has transport issues and traffic issues, the current solution is to spend more on roads and provide the infrastructure to create more smog and pollution and green house gases.

The Eastern Freeway used to be fantastic and free flowing, not these days. With the increase in population and the city sprawl spreading further out, it makes it so difficult to supply suitable infrastructure.

Travelling on a bus into the city you see some of the 50,000 cars in the morning and 50,000 cars in the evening that travel down the Eastern Freeway. There is no Train, just Buses.
Some simple maths shows the following:-

• 50 people per bus
• 1000 buses morning an night
• Buses can do multiple trips (limited time during peak hour 2.5 hours)
• Say 5 trips each that would require 200 buses
• Conservatively 100 buses in and out

If you add 100 buses to just this freeway during the peak time, there would be an extra bus leaving every 2 minutes.
100 buses would also increase the number of routes available to patrons, providing a better service.

Taking out say 30,000 cars morning and night, it would reduce pollution; reduce the amount of commuter time. It would increase routes, service and frequency of service.

All of this sounds great.

Now what would happen if we did this for the Monash Freeway, the Westgate Freeway and the Tullamarine Freeway?
That would be 400 buses going into and out of the City, taking out say 90,000 cars from the city each day.

How much pollution & congestion would that eliminate?
Would our current road system need expanding? Could we spend that money on better things?
Would this make Melbourne the Most Liveable City in the World?

Let’s do something positive for the commuters, the environment and the city.

I saw an interview with the Mayor of Marysville yesterday. The observations made were that because there were no schools and no jobs, the population have moved to other locations, and that these people will not come back because they are building new lives.

This illustrates my issue with the way Australia is handling their current Refugee issues.

Refugees should be encouraged to live in Regional towns for a period of 8 years. By which time they will have kids at schools, jobs and businesses within the local community. Being a country person myself, I think it would also show them the BEST parts of Australia.  This encouragement can be done by making Social Security and Taxation incentive and disencentives if they stay in the regional area.

This will help build a critical mass in these communities to strengthen these communities and make them sustainable.  We need to develop regional cities of 50,000 to 75,000 people, rather than developing unsustainable monster cities of Millions of people. These scattered regional cities would supply hubs of infrastructure, employment and services throughout the country.

This would allow our farming communities to continue in a more profitable way. Farms have many issues, some of which include the younger generation leaving the farms to find employment. With these regional cities, they can continue on the farms while working in the ‘city’ during the day.

Well it has taken 3 and a half days, but finally I think I understand enough about Word Press blogs to actually start using it.