Melbourne traffic: 134,000 trucks to congest country and city roads

More than 130,000 trucks are about to hit our roads, after a half-built rural rail project for freight run out of funds.

How many more trucks will affect city and country road users.

At least half Victoria’s vast 10 million-tonne grain harvest is about to be forced off the dilapidated northwest rail network and on to trucks that will tear up country roads and rumble through the suburban streets to ports in Melbourne and Geelong.

Transport consultant Michael O’Callaghan said about 134,000 truck trips would be needed to get this season’s bumper harvest, plus containers of citrus, wine, table grapes, nuts and hay to ports this season.

Victoria’s grain and horticulture exporters have been warning Transport Infrastructure Minister Jacinta Allan for months that she must find the funds to complete half-built Murray Basin Rail Project, to get 70-80 per cent of the state’s grain and container freight off trucks and on to trains.

But Ms Allan has ignored those calls, dumping the Andrews Government promise to fully upgrade and standardise the 1133km rail freight network, after running out of funds in June last year.

The Andrews Government has left the half-completed Murray Basin Rail Project in a worse state than when work started.

The Victorian Auditor General’s Office has described the Minister and her department’s oversight of the botched $440 million project as poor and criticised the “diffused senior officer accountability for project outcomes”.

VAGO and key industry players have told Ms Allan the project is now in a worse state than when the Government started work in 2015, with freight trains on the Mildura line diverted an extra 130km on to the speed-restricted Ararat rail loop, while the Manangatang and Sea Lake lines have been left stranded as a broad-gauge lines in a narrower standard-gauge network.

“The Mildura line has less capacity (now) than when we started the project,” GrainCorp future network project manager Peter Johnston said.

“It means 50 per cent of the export task will go by trucks to Portland, Melbourne and Geelong.”

GrainCorp and Emerald Grain need to push at least 500,000 tonnes of grain through the ports of Melbourne and Geelong each month, equal to 226 train sets or alternatively more than 11,300 truck trips, which freight operators warn will clog urban roads and tear up country roads.

Wine, tablegrape, citrus and even hay exporters say leaving the Basin Rail Project half-completed means they have little choice but to put their containers on to massive 30m-plus A-double trucks, operating at weights of up to 85.5 tonnes.

VicRoads maps show the Calder, Sunraysia and Mallee highways have already been opened up to these heavy vehicles, with a raft of other secondary roads opened or slated to be opened in the near future.

Even the viability of intermodal freight hubs at Merbein and Ultima are at risk, while proponents of another at Ouyen say it will be abandoned if the full Murray Basin Rail Project is not delivered in full.

Mr O’Callaghan, who is advising the Ouyen community on setting up an intermodal transport hub, said building the facility for hay and other exports was dependent on getting trains to port and back again in 24 hours to compete with road transport.

But he said that was impossible unless the Government delivered on its original promise to extend the standard gauge track from Maryborough, through Ballarat and down to Gheringhap, near Geelong.

He said the Ouyen hub would inject $11.3m into the region’s economy, create 75 to 90 jobs and remove 8.4 million truck kilometres from regional roads right through to the inner suburbs of Melbourne.

Deloitte Access Economics reported the grain growers incurred the highest transport cost in the nation, at 27.5 per cent of their gross income, while fruit and vegetables growers came in at 21 per cent of their GVAP.

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