Melbourne is dirty and dying and bike lanes and alfresco dining are not the answer
Melbourne is dirty, drab and dying but bike lanes and outdoor dining are not the way to bring it back to life, claims Steve Price.
Opinion
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A visit to the Melbourne CBD at lunchtime midweek three days ago revealed a smelly, drab shadow of the once vibrant city we all loved.
It’s sad to say the COVID lockdowns - caused by inept hotel quarantine - has the place once known as the world’s most liveable city on life support.
Dirty footpaths and garbage-strewn laneways, surrounded by still boarded up cafes and coffee bars - it’s a disgrace that the people in charge seemed to have convinced themselves
Melburnians will bounce back into town as if by magic.
They are kidding themselves and if we are not very careful, we will find ourselves the Southern Hemisphere version of New York City, now said to be a dangerous and dirty place to be avoided.
Cities don’t bounce back by themselves and a wander around Melbourne as I did this week is just depressing. Traffic has been run out of town with vibrant shopping streets like Exhibition and Bourke now construction zones, taken over by bike lane madness.
This lunacy of pandering to a loud but tiny pushbike lobby that will turn those streets into part of a 40km bike lane cancer that will choke Melbourne forever.
A short wander along Exhibition Street where part of this bike lane vandalism has been completed shows, as you can see from the photographs, not only NO bikes in the bike lane
but NO bikes in the bike racks.
According to Melbourne City council propaganda this program is central to their $100 million Melbourne City Recovery Plan – why? How do pushbike riders boost the
vibrancy of the city and attract visitors?
Victorians who live in outer suburban Melbourne or in regional and country Victoria will visit Melbourne mostly by car.
Take away street parking and clogging up the CBD by limiting car access just turns people away.
Public transport is an option, but people are avoiding trains and trams because they don’t want to wear masks or put themselves at risk. One car park I walked past in Little Collins St was
charging $65 for two hours and if you can find a park on the street – good luck – $14 for the same two hours.
A separate part of this $100 million recovery folly – $50 million from city ratepayers $50 million from Victorian taxpayers – is outside dining on footpaths.
This week on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday the overnight low was eight degrees and from Monday it’s raining all week.
Who in their right mind wants to sit in a wet cold windy street in an empty city eating a bowl of pasta while freezing? Not me!
The mobile foot traffic on the day I visited seemed to consist of a combination of homeless people, fast food delivery drivers, construction workers building bike lanes and the odd
office worker out for a coffee.
Footpaths normally so teeming with people you have to dodge your way to your destination are all but deserted. The latest figures I could find from the Property Council suggested in March CBD office occupancy was stuck at just 35 per cent.
Let me tell you, at the end of April, it’s no better and the shuttered lunch-bars, cafes and laneways don’t lie. It’s crisis time and someone needs to come up with a few solutions
because bike lanes and trendy ads featuring little known comedians talking about FOMO don’t cut it.
For a start the State Government must tell the overpaid public service mandarins who run mega-departments to get ALL their city-based workers back into the office.
Give them discounted public transport fares or free weekday city parking. I don’t really care how you convince them to ditch their active wear and get back to the city but do it.
Forget this idea of asking Canberra for permission to fly-in 120 overseas students a week. Before COVID the fee-paying tribes that swamped RMIT, Melbourne University and the various privately run city-based higher education facilities numbered 80,000.
At the 120 a-week rate that’s two years to get back to where we were – and we can’t wait that long. Let’s use some of that $100 million Melbourne City Recovery fund on solutions for
rebirthing this vital education economic supercharger. One reason the city feels so empty is the absence of these bright youngsters from around the world and their visiting families.
With a State Government still bruised from its hotel quarantine bungles and seemingly caught in the headlights of what to do without Premier Daniel Andrews in the chair, plus a Melbourne City Council seemingly captured by the bike loving Greens, our city needs leadership like never before.
How we miss someone like Ron Walker teaming up with Jeff Kennett to put a bomb under people. Why not put the call out for the truly passionate leaders of Melbourne, people with talent and a profile willing to step up?
The short-list - and I’d welcome nominations - should include Eddie McGuire (plenty of time on his hands), Crown Casino’s Anne Peacock, hospitality giants Ronaldo Di-Stasio and Chris
Lucas, AFL figures Gillon McLachlan and Peggy O’Neal, Matt Gudinski and maybe billionaires like Lindsay Fox and Solomon Lew.
No shortage of talent and that’s just a list off the top of my head.
Melbourne is too important to lose as a vibrant, cosmopolitan Australian city but as it stands today, I wouldn’t recommend it as a place to visit.
Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney are all better cities to spend time in and it’s been a long time since that’s been the case.
In a column carried in News Corp papers this week New York based Australian journalist Miranda Devine described her current hometown NYC like this: “Without tourists and
office workers, mid-town became zombie-town-meets-Bladerunner. All around signs of chaos and disorder with cracked footpaths, potholed streets and sidewalks smeared with dog droppings.”
That’s not our Melbourne yet, but it will be unless someone shows the leadership to stop this slide and quickly.
DISLIKES
> Porsche driver whose name doesn’t deserve to be uttered and the inadequate sentence for a crime that disgusted us all.
> Woke Oscars stars picking up their $250,000 gift bags full of overpriced garbage while the US battles COVID.
> Seems like yesterday but 25 years have passed since Port Arthur and the tragic deaths of 35 innocent people.
> Australians trapped in India’s COVID meltdown locked out of their own country.
LIKES
> Dustin Martin spending the weekend with his dad in New Zealand after 18 months apart and Damien Hardwick’s support.
> A time-warp lunch at Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar - who needs to go to Italy?
> Country footy on Anzac weekend, watching the Sorrento Sharks with a really great crowd.
> The Vietnam veterans from the Tunnel Rats contingent who just turned up banner and all and marched despite Nanny State rules saying they couldn’t.
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