Inescapable problem with Melbourne’s mega-cities on urban fringe

They’ve been sold to homeowners as the ticket to the Great Australian Dream. But a closer look at Melbourne’s mega-cities exposes a frightening truth.

Melbourne’s population is booming.

It was true when I wrote that seven years ago and it continues to be true today.

In percentage terms, it is growing faster than any other capital city. By 2034, Melbourne’s population will jump from 5.2 million to a staggering 6.5 million.

Mostly, the change is hard to notice. But on Melbourne’s fringe, you can’t miss it.

Fifty minutes north of the city, in what was once the sleepy suburb of Donnybrook, enormous housing estates are turning old farm land into mega-cities that will dwarf the Melbourne CBD.

More than 30,000 homes have already been built there but plans for one estate show that it will be almost three times larger than the city. For scale, it could just fit between Brunswick and South Melbourne — that’s more than 10km as the crow flies.

But ask anybody who lives there and they will tell you the great Australian dream comes with one huge caveat — there is only one road in and one road out.

Donnybrook has seen thousands of new homes pop up over 10 years.

The estate of Cloverton is expected to be bigger than Canberra.

Donnybrook Road, bottom of screen, is one lane both ways and divides farm land on one side from huge expansion on the other.

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At peak hour, both morning and afternoon, the single lane Donnybrook Road takes drivers 40 minutes to travel a stretch of 2.5km to the entrance of the Hume Highway for access to the city.

On one side of the road, as cars crawl along bumper-to-bumper, cows graze — a throwback to a quieter time. On the other side of the road, identical homes are being erected as far as you can see.

The lack of planning infrastructure here has created a dystopian city that one expert called “the worst designed in the world”.

News.com.au visited Donnybrook and the estates of Cloverton, Donnybrae, Olivine and Peppercorn Hill. Locals all said the same thing about the suburban sprawl — there are too many homes and not enough roads.

“People here have paid their $700,000 for a house and there’s no infrastructure,” Olivine resident John told news.com.au.

“We didn’t even have a supermarket when we moved here,” he said.

Show homes at Cloverton off Donnybrook Road. Picture: news.com.au

Cloverton, highlighted with diagonal lines, overlaid on Melbourne shows the scale of the planning.

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“The estate’s been there for 10 years, they built all the houses and then they decided, ‘oh, we’d better build a shopping centre’ and then we’d better build another road out of the estates themselves but people have been living here for 10 years.

“It’s unbelievable. Construction is going up everywhere.”

Another resident, who did not wish to be named, said people have to leave before first light just to get to work on time.

“It is the most frustrating part about living here,” she said. “Everybody is going to the same place, but the traffic is a nightmare.”

Victorian Liberal MP and Member for the Northern Metropolitan Region, Evan Mulholland, called Donnybrook Road “the worst game of lemmings you’ve ever seen”.

“It is misery. It is just awful for these residents. Tens of thousands of homes have been built on the side of a single lane farm track that was never meant to cope,” he told news.com.au.

“Their quality of life is diminished because they’re spending 2.5 hours a day in the car — that takes a real toll and a lot of people have sold up and got out.

“The frightening thing is that (construction of the estates) is only 30 per cent done. Cloverton is going to be the size of Canberra. We’re talking about 480,000 people. They want to build a hospital, a Westfield, a tafe. But there is no infrastructure to meet it.

There is a boom north of Melbourne but planning has not kept up.

“It’s a failure of planning. They’ve botched the delivery of these growth areas.”

By “they”, he means the Labor Government. To their credit, they issued a press release earlier this month declaring “we’re progressing planning for the upgrade of Donnybrook Road”.

“Options being explored include adding more road lanes, upgrading intersections, upgrading the Hume Freeway interchange, building cycling and walking paths.”

But Mr Mulholland said all they’ve done is “announced a website”.

“There’s no dollar value for planning. There is loads of political pressure on this because it’s all everybody wants to talk to me about.”

News.com.au has reached out to the Minister for Transport Infrastructure. A Victorian Government spokesperson said: “We’re getting on with planning work for the Donnybrook Road Upgrade, a project that will reduce travel times and cater for the growing population.

“Communities that build more homes deserve more infrastructure - that’s why we’re working on a simplified and fairer infrastructure contributions system that will deliver more infrastructure to communities like Donnybrook and Kalkallo.”

“We won’t take lectures from Evan Mulholland and the Victorian Liberals who opposed level crossing removals, opposed road upgrades and opposed the Metro Tunnel — projects that will get people in Melbourne’s north where they need sooner.”

Planning expert Professor Michael Buxton from RMIT called Melbourne’s outer suburbs “probably the worst designed in the world”.

“We’re locating huge numbers of people (in Melbourne’s outer growth corridors),” he told A Current Affair in 2023.

“A million and a half more people are going to be living in these suburbs in the next 25-30 years. We’re really condemning huge numbers of new Melbourne residents to live in areas that are going to be very unlivable.”

One of Donnybrook’s last remaining original homes is up for sale.

Federal Liberal Member Wendy Lovell has urgently called on Labor to “urgently prioritise the duplication of Donnybrook Road, as local residents suffer traffic nightmare”.

“Donnybrook is exploding in population, and residents of the new housing estates along Donnybrook Road are deeply frustrated with the Allan Labor Government’s lack of progress on upgrading Donnybrook Road.

“Motorists leaving the Hume Freeway to join Donnybrook Road must squeeze into a single turning lane in order to go over the single-lane flyover bridge and travel along the single-lane road to the east.

“At peak hour the volume of traffic is far too high to flow quickly, resulting in the exit lane from the Hume Freeway onto Donnybrook Road being chronically congested.”

At Donnybrook on Thursday, the train station was empty. There was nobody waiting on the platform to head into the CBD. Part of the reason for that is that trains run on the V-Line service once an hour.

A booklet spruiking the benefits of moving to Cloverton says it will include “rolling green spaces”, a “healthy lifestyle” that “has never been more achievable” and $10m regional playing fields”.

It sounds like the dream. The only thing left is to organise is a way in and out.