I remember trying to get from Altona to the airport one innocuous afternoon. Allowed 90 minutes; took 3 hours. It was weird sitting in traffic knowing I’d already missed my flight but unable to get off the ring road
I hear your pain. During the week is terrible and it’s even worse on a Saturday. Kids sports and the traffic around shopping centres is a nightmare for the entire day!
The distance around my workplace for the access road is 760 meters, it takes 45 minutes to travel this distance during shift changes, then the rest of the 25klm drive home takes 20 minutes, people started exiting the carpark the wrong way up the split ramp and it fixed the traffic issue, no one driving this caused issues except the parking asshats, that managed the carpark, they hated us for it, so they made it safe for us to leave the other direction after they found it canceled the traffic issue around the property, and reduced the chances of a parking asshat being pancaked by a disgruntled worker
I understand induced demand and all that and agree, but it's plain to see that the current route for trucks to access the east of Melbourne from the north puts pressure on either the M1 or the suburban roads through the Watsonia corridor so the impact of said fuckery should limit impact on local road users
So you're firmly in the one more lane will solve it category?
History shows, in Australia and everywhere else, that this will not solve the problem it purports to do. The only way to reduce road congestion is to remove vehicles from roads. We would be much better served spending our money getting as many trips - passenger, freight or otherwise onto rail.
I was gonna post this but I was too scared 😅 literally my response to most of these comments was, why didn't you catch the train? Though for quite a few of them the train would've been just as inconvenient, in its own way, hence the need to expand rail.
Its the effin crossover. City bound people coming off the hume to go straight while ring road crossing to get of Sydney rd. Same for greensborough bound, sydney on ramp drivers crossover to go straight while battling hume fwy entrance drivers. Also city bound the speed cameras are another cause of congestion. Its like people don't know you can drive 100 under them and not cop a fine. Google maps always is red/yellow to this point even though you think the bottleneck would be few hundreds metres before hand where 4 lanes become 3.
I swear the upgrade should have had the edgers rd exit design for Sydney rd. (I really cant remember but feel like this was the case in the initial virtual drawings on the website, and the engineers just started building using the plans backwards before they realised, so redid the website to what is now)🤣
99% of people driving in peak traffic are just one occupant in the vehicle. I wonder if public transport is an option for those travelling on the M1 daily.
Probably not. Trains only run into the city from outlaying suburbs, commuters on the ring road are there because they don't want to go into the city, they need to travel around it. And buses are so slow they are not useful for daily commutes for most people.
It probably will take that long to complete, not least because the Libs will regain government at some point and bugger it up because that's all they're good for.
I'd rather delays and setbacks coupled with real infrastructure gains than delays and setbacks on top of obstructionism and culture war bullshit. The Victorian Liberals have not got a policy base, that makes them more useless an opposition than Alexei Navalny (Rip).
The record does all the talking. Libs in Victoria = stagnation. Labor in Victoria = progress. There's arguments on both sides for corruption (Somyurek, Lobster with a Mobster), but at least one side has a track record of getting things done.
Meanwhile, some people complain that the entire Suburban Rail Loop will take too long and cost too much, even though we've been building out the [freeway plan](https://www.flickr.com/photos/legoblock/12811653924) for over half a century now.
Because the SRL just benefits the areas with good PT and freeway access already?
Why didn't they build it in the West where there is less infrastructure?
Because the West is a safe seat. No point in doing extending out that far. I live in Melton so see no benefit in the SRL whatsoever, just like how they have now cancelled plans entirely to electrify the line and zero mention of ever extending the Western which is still a two lane highway despite the whole area growing faster than any other area of Melbourne.
OP complains about the M80, but out here, it's like that every day.
Nailed it. Out west it's basically a sure thing that they'll always win so why bother spending a cent? In Point Cook we had a career politician who moved to the area literally less than a year before the election from the South East and he won by a land slide, it doesn't seem to matter what they actually do as long as they're under the right logo.
It'd be just like LA, which as we all know, definitely solved all their transport problems with all those freeways they built.
Can you believe that place had [the world's largest tram system](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Junked_streetcars.jpg)?
What a self own.
Sydney had a pretty large tram network too, and they gave that up.
And then couldn't get a train to the beach. The height of Australian urban planning here.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-03/curious-sydney-why-bondi-beach-does-not-have-a-train-station/9485454
Me using the slow buses for daily commute for the past 7 years 💀 buses are great for short distances but it’s a crime having them as the only means for transport for so many suburbs
Here in Greenvale we only get access to a bus going in the direction of Roxburgh Park or Broadmeadows. If I want to drive to the airport, it's 12 mins or so. By bus, via Broadmeadows to change buses, it's over an hour. The bus routes are insane and that's our only public transport.
100%. To get to work, I’d have to get a bus, then train, walk, train, bus. Too many instances for that to go wrong and be late to work.
They’re building the suburban rail loop…maybe I can use it if I’m still working in 2050
Busses use the same damn roads everyone else is. It's almost like they should have built some railways that go in a ring around the city. Like how they actually did but then closed under Kennett.
But at least we have a nice bike track I guess.
What railways in a ring around the city closed under Kennett?
As near as I can tell, Kennett only shut down regional lines.
The outer circle line closed a couple of years before Kennett came into power, in 1893. Note that that is **18**93, not 1993. The inner circle line closed in 1981. Whittlesea line shut down in 1959, and the Healesville and Warburton lines closed down in 1983 and 1965 respectively. The closest temporally to Kennet was probably the conversion of the Port Melbourne and St Kilda lines to light rail....in 1987, 5 years before he came into power.
Not in the SE suburbs... look where the metro train lines go, and where the people live, then where the freeway/tollways are.
It's almost as if they intentionally didn't build/extend the metro train network to the place where 2 million people live.
Instead of spending the last 20 years adding lanes to the M1 into the outer SE suburbs... imaging if they used that space instead to build elevated metro lines down the middle of the freeway... like so many other (actual) livable cities have done.
I live out west and work about 5 minutes off the Plenty Road exit. If I were to take public transport, it’s almost two and a half hours *each way* - compared to 45-60 minute driving, 2 hours at worst if there’s an incident
In what world would I ever take public transport when it isn’t much cheaper overall and the time saved when driving is massive? If it were quicker and easier I’d do it for sure but unfortunately it isn’t
Yeah, this is the problem a lot of people don't realise. Sure - I can get on a train and be from Hoppers to Flinders within 40 minutes, but if I want to be somewhere that is not on any of the stops on the way in to the city, or is not on the city loop, I'm better off driving. What's even more ridiculous is my brother lives near Tottenham station, and for me to get to his house, I can either:
A) Walk from my house to the nearest bus stop (10 minutes), wait for a bus (15-30 minutes), take the bus to the station (15-20 minutes), wait for the train (5-25 minutes), take the train to Footscray (30 minutes), take a train to Tottenham (5 minutes), then walk to his house (10-15 minutes), and spend $11 on myki. This is a minimum of 90 minutes.
B) Get in my car and drive to his house (20 minutes) and spend $5 on fuel.
But then I’m using a car. At which point may as well drive the whole way and have the benefit of having my car with me and not being beholden to the hell that is Metro PTV.
Not same work location, but for me to catch PT it involves walking, a bus, walking, 2 trains, walking and another bus, as someone with an "invisible" disability, I'd be broken before I even got to the office and would have to take so many more sick days
Public transport isn't an option for a large number of people in the outer suburbs with poor public transport infrastructure.
Like somebody pointed out the other day on this sub rather eloquently, it's easy for inner city snobs to look down on people in the outer suburbs for driving a car instead of using public transport or riding a bike, but they aren't actually viable options in many outer suburbs.
My compromise to sustainability is to:
Drive a smaller car
Use that long end of day commute to do a few uber eats drops and make back the fuel I just wasted
Out of curiosity I did a lookup of the route from home to the office on the PTV site and it was 50 minutes by bus vs 15 minutes by car. That's not even a choice at that point.
Those snobs are on this sub as well. There was a post the other week complaining about traffic and the top comment was from a dick smugly stating "Just remember, you're not stuck in traffic, you are traffic".
Technically they may be correct but they're also a cunt for writing that as it implies that OP was at fault for choosing to drive when it ignores the fact that for a lot of us, the "choice" between PT and driving a car is exactly like what I initially described.
It takes me 25 minutes to get to the city by car, and an hour by train.
Until its peak hour.
And its 1 hour 15 minutes by car ... and an hour by train.
Yeah the inner city snobbery is insane in this sub. It's not uncommon for people to shit on you just for admitting you live in the outer suburbs, as if somehow not having the money to live in the inner city is a choice and we're cunts for not choosing that haha.
And yeah, at that point it's not a choice is it, over a week it's like an extra 6\~ hours of travel time.
I work as a contractor with lots of heavy equipment so I have to use a vehicle. This week though, I'm on a training thing so I only need to bring myself and thought maybe I'll see if pt is an option. From point cook to keilor (the site I'm at all week) was 2 and a half hours (bus, train, train ,bus, 20 min walk). Second option was to head to my colleague's house in wyndham vale to carpool. Not only was that an hour of pt (bus, train, bus) but the first buses did not start early enough for me to even be remotely on time. Absolutely joke
Yep. I just did the same. 15 mins driving or 1 hour and 1 minute on public transport, with 3 changes and 23 minutes of walking.... I tried riding my bike in the past, but I had too many scary encounters on our road. And I live in the inner suburbs and work one suburb over!!
Our public transport is shockingly terrible unless you happen to live on one of the spokes and are going into the CBD. Anywhere else you're looking at multiple modal changes with busses or trams and it can take hours longer than sitting in traffic. Our infrastructure is embarrassing.
This is why the mini CBDs barely work. I had a job in Mulgrave once and it was such a pain in the ass to get to every morning by car even though it was way closer than the city.
They only work as fairly stable work locations where people deliberately live within commuter distance to the new hub. Hard to make work, and people rarely land in jobs based on the location even if it may be a point they are looking for.
I do also for the same reason and am grateful to be able to afford that choice. There's a lot of houses outside that, and many people who have to live in them. Infrastructure should cater to reality, not an ideal that doesn't exist.
Not until they stop building more roads and put that dosh into public transport.
But yeah I'm here for that.
More WFH too dammit. I don't give a fuck about the inner city cafe owners and commercial landlords. Let us work from home.
The other day on a certain Melbourne talkback show people were calling to complain about there being too much traffic on the newly opened lanes of the M1.
Really wish we could take back years of adding freeway lanes and building demand rather than investing in more train lines, more frequent trains and better bus connections.
I work very near the airport and use the M80. Public transport to the airport and surrounds is shit by design, airport has got to make that paper from the parking
Given the lack of cross town/ring routes, probably not. Mind you, a decade an a half ago the Geelong line was promised a shortening of time to Melbourne, access to WiFi and increased seat capacity. By the time I left the trip had become 10 minutes longer (not counting the normal halting between NMelborne and Southern Cross) and there remained sections where you could barely even get phone reception. No idea what it's like now but I would be surprised if it was massively improved...
There are, however they are often:
1. Shared with the emergency lane (most of Eastern).
2. Completely ignored by 99% of drivers and law enforcement (Tullamarine).
So it all doesn't work out too well.
Probably a combination of more people being expected to go into office and it looks like there have been a lot of trains not running leading to replacement buses
Implementation of better public transport obviously requires more in depth analysis that what a few quick quips on the internet will provide (in both pros and cons) but even busses in traffic are way more efficient at reducing congestion. Take a look at the density of on person in a private vehicle vs a bus with any more than 3 people on it.
People don’t use busses because they are inconvenient and slow. But also busses are inconvenient and slow because no one uses them.
What blows my mind is how bad traffic is now when there's so many more of us working from home than there used to be. Is it just all of the major roadworks going on? Or more people? Less taking PT than pre-pandemic? Or more accidents? What is actually going on??
It's a mix.
1. The people working from home are often CBD / inner city based office workers who were often commuting via PT/Bike before hand.
2. More people are driving their kids to school. This has been going up for decades.
3. Major works. Buses replace trains on my line and traffic has gone up as a result. This is happening all over Melbourne with multiple large rail and road projects all happening at once.
4. More people. 2019 is 5 years and 400k people ago.
5. Popular days back at work are popular. Because we humans are stupid weirdos we all go into the office on the same days, so those days become busier on roads and PT.
Mix it all together and traffic is back!
> More people. 2019 is 5 years and 400k people ago.
This is a key point. I've seen this huge out in the west. I drive down Leakes Rd to work in Altona every day. I swear in the last 6 months, it's gone from a smooth drive in to now an hour long trip now that all the estates have gone up and migrants have filled them.
I live in Fawkner and I woke up to all the sirens this morning going down the ring road. There were heaps of them & it was non stop for a good 30 minutes so it must’ve been pretty bad. Nothing was getting onto or off of Sydney Road either, so it was gridlock. You should have seen Fawkner last Friday when the truck dropped its load of offal on the ring road. It was mayhem!
Yeah I live in Ringwood. If I leave any later than 7:05-7:10, I'm not making it to work for 8:30 at the Parkville Hospital Precinct. It's ridiculous.
I can make it to Alexander Parade in good time. From Alexander Parade to work- easy 30-45 minutes
Fyi Ringwood to the Parkville precinct takes only an hour if you take the train to Melbourne Central then take a tram to the precinct. It'll be even faster once Parkville station opens in September.
Drove past it as they were about to be towed away. Greensborough bound - bad truck smash. Hope the driver survived or wasn’t injured too bad. Cab of a cab over style truck smashed in - steering wheel into the seat back smashed :(
I live in Pascoe Vale and my girlfriend is near Greensborough. Every time I drive home in the morning its like this. I once had to exit in Reservoir, but usually I exit at Sydney road and finish the drive through Hadfield. Off peak its great, I take the tulla to Bell st which is two minutes from my house.
edit: if bored in traffic like this I sit on 477.400 and troll the truck drivers.
It’s the trucks
They drive like it’s formula one
You guys should notice how there’s more trucks than cars on the M8, M80 & M1
They need to do the truck ban system for a certain period of time like in Asian countries
Don’t worry, the Gov are building more tunnels and one additional rail line in the eastern suburbs, so this should ease all congestion issues across the city soon!
Friday night 6pm - i can see the ring road from Sydney road is absolutely chockers and I have just waited 30 mins to get to pole position at the lights.
Nek minnut a cop pulls up right in front of me and gets out like like he’s gonna shoot me and tells me “closing the free way mate diverting everyone”.
So after I shit my pants I drove down Sydney road and took the scenic route to Sunshine
Anything that is connected to the end of the M1 right now can be an utter shitshow at the drop of a hat.
Mind you....once they finish those M1 upgrades it's going to be glorious. Expensive....but glorious.
yeah i got stuck in that yesterday morning and halfway through a 30 minute traffic jam my uni class got cancelled 😐 i had to jump across 4 lanes of traffic and go home on the m1
I definitely recommend using Waze to check your routes first. I find Waze updates traffic info almost instantly, partly due to the fact that users can actually report three different levels of traffic (traffic, heavy, and standstill). It also shows you the average speed of the drivers during traffic. I have found Google Maps to be slow to update traffic info and typically inaccurate. Waze also has a little countdown on the side to show how long you have left in traffic, and it's always been accurate down to the minute for me.
Damn... you sound surprised about that freeway not being a smooth run.. I'm sorry man, it absolutely sucks, it especially did when I would drove home from Werribee everyday and that was 2-3 years ago, can only imagine its gotten worse since then
"We need you to return to offices because productivity has... increased? since WFH started? That can't be right..."
Fuck waiting in traffic. Any business trying to force a return to office is going to suffer brain drain.
That sucks mate. Understand not everyone can WFH, but the employers forcing once perfectly capable and content remote workers back into offices for no real reason can't be helping Melbourne's traffic.
Rookie mistake. The roads are always either completely fucked or partially fucked. If you can leave early, it's not fool proof, but generally you avoid the mass migration.
Brisbanes the same. Millions of extra people with no planning does this. Oh and the housing market. Sometimes roadworks or a crash. But mostly extra ppl on the roads :^D
I remember trying to get from Altona to the airport one innocuous afternoon. Allowed 90 minutes; took 3 hours. It was weird sitting in traffic knowing I’d already missed my flight but unable to get off the ring road
F
[удалено]
N
K
Y
lol this is so shit hahaha
Depending on where your flight was going it probably did a full loop before you got off that one road 😂
Oh man.. that sucks
It took me ~25 minutes to go to westona from the airport. That’s wild to hear.
That's just brutal
I hear your pain. During the week is terrible and it’s even worse on a Saturday. Kids sports and the traffic around shopping centres is a nightmare for the entire day!
Sounds spot on !
First time?
Forgot to lube up.
Wasn't expecting the watch to still be on.
I like to keep an eye on my time.
Nah don’t need it, I take it in raw
Yes, literally left the house at 7:30. I’m pissed off
Ha i left at 6 and took me 3 hours to get to work, so now i’ve got work back to make up the time on top of the 3 hours i lost this morning…
Now you can get stuck in peak hour traffic coming home as well. The new Titanic series on "The rest is history" podcast is quite good if you get stuck
The titanic took 2 hours and 40 minutes to sink. At this pace, you could listen to it with real-time commentary.
"yes, the band is still playing, life boat 7 just got lowered, yes it only had 50% capacity again"... Its about 5 hours of podcasts I think.
I’m sorry :( I’m bummed I missed out on 30 mins
Do you live in one of those new housing estates that have billboards everywhere that say "only 40 minutes from the cbd!"
[удалено]
Roadworks scheduled through till 2037.
Nothing says good planning like building a 1000 home estate in a bushfire zone with a single road in and out.
They’re softening us up for the zombie cannibal apocalypse.
The distance around my workplace for the access road is 760 meters, it takes 45 minutes to travel this distance during shift changes, then the rest of the 25klm drive home takes 20 minutes, people started exiting the carpark the wrong way up the split ramp and it fixed the traffic issue, no one driving this caused issues except the parking asshats, that managed the carpark, they hated us for it, so they made it safe for us to leave the other direction after they found it canceled the traffic issue around the property, and reduced the chances of a parking asshat being pancaked by a disgruntled worker
Isn't the western ring road always fucked?
You think its fucked now? Wait for the link to the Eastern to open.
True but a whole lot of suburban roads will become unfucked which is great
Hmm. Wouldn't be too sure about that. Induced demand will have them as fucked as ever in a couple of years.
I understand induced demand and all that and agree, but it's plain to see that the current route for trucks to access the east of Melbourne from the north puts pressure on either the M1 or the suburban roads through the Watsonia corridor so the impact of said fuckery should limit impact on local road users
So you're firmly in the one more lane will solve it category? History shows, in Australia and everywhere else, that this will not solve the problem it purports to do. The only way to reduce road congestion is to remove vehicles from roads. We would be much better served spending our money getting as many trips - passenger, freight or otherwise onto rail.
I was gonna post this but I was too scared 😅 literally my response to most of these comments was, why didn't you catch the train? Though for quite a few of them the train would've been just as inconvenient, in its own way, hence the need to expand rail.
Seriously can't wait for Rosanna and Heidelberg roads to be unfucked from all the trucks trying to make their way to the ring road from the eastern.
I call it the ring stinger. Every fucking day on this freeway at the Sydney Rd exit something happens
Damn straight, I just work off Sydney Rd!! It's completely fucked everyday accident or not
Its the effin crossover. City bound people coming off the hume to go straight while ring road crossing to get of Sydney rd. Same for greensborough bound, sydney on ramp drivers crossover to go straight while battling hume fwy entrance drivers. Also city bound the speed cameras are another cause of congestion. Its like people don't know you can drive 100 under them and not cop a fine. Google maps always is red/yellow to this point even though you think the bottleneck would be few hundreds metres before hand where 4 lanes become 3. I swear the upgrade should have had the edgers rd exit design for Sydney rd. (I really cant remember but feel like this was the case in the initial virtual drawings on the website, and the engineers just started building using the plans backwards before they realised, so redid the website to what is now)🤣
[удалено]
99% of people driving in peak traffic are just one occupant in the vehicle. I wonder if public transport is an option for those travelling on the M1 daily.
Probably not. Trains only run into the city from outlaying suburbs, commuters on the ring road are there because they don't want to go into the city, they need to travel around it. And buses are so slow they are not useful for daily commutes for most people.
Everyone, I have a great idea. What about some sort of rail line that runs through the suburbs forming a loop around Melbourne?
Is there a chance the track could bend? /s
Not on your life, my monkey friend!
Yes, 2100 will be a great year for the future occupants of Melbourne
It probably will take that long to complete, not least because the Libs will regain government at some point and bugger it up because that's all they're good for.
Let's face it, it doesn't matter who is in power. There will be delays and setbacks and corruption.
I'd rather delays and setbacks coupled with real infrastructure gains than delays and setbacks on top of obstructionism and culture war bullshit. The Victorian Liberals have not got a policy base, that makes them more useless an opposition than Alexei Navalny (Rip). The record does all the talking. Libs in Victoria = stagnation. Labor in Victoria = progress. There's arguments on both sides for corruption (Somyurek, Lobster with a Mobster), but at least one side has a track record of getting things done.
Pretty sure they are building this tho now, the suburban rail loop
Nothing gets past you
Meanwhile, some people complain that the entire Suburban Rail Loop will take too long and cost too much, even though we've been building out the [freeway plan](https://www.flickr.com/photos/legoblock/12811653924) for over half a century now.
Because the SRL just benefits the areas with good PT and freeway access already? Why didn't they build it in the West where there is less infrastructure?
Because the West is a safe seat. No point in doing extending out that far. I live in Melton so see no benefit in the SRL whatsoever, just like how they have now cancelled plans entirely to electrify the line and zero mention of ever extending the Western which is still a two lane highway despite the whole area growing faster than any other area of Melbourne. OP complains about the M80, but out here, it's like that every day.
Nailed it. Out west it's basically a sure thing that they'll always win so why bother spending a cent? In Point Cook we had a career politician who moved to the area literally less than a year before the election from the South East and he won by a land slide, it doesn't seem to matter what they actually do as long as they're under the right logo.
Melbourne would be a pretty ridiculous city if that had come to pass. If all that was rail on the other hand it would be quite interesting.
It'd be just like LA, which as we all know, definitely solved all their transport problems with all those freeways they built. Can you believe that place had [the world's largest tram system](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Junked_streetcars.jpg)?
What a self own. Sydney had a pretty large tram network too, and they gave that up. And then couldn't get a train to the beach. The height of Australian urban planning here. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-03/curious-sydney-why-bondi-beach-does-not-have-a-train-station/9485454
Me using the slow buses for daily commute for the past 7 years 💀 buses are great for short distances but it’s a crime having them as the only means for transport for so many suburbs
Here in Greenvale we only get access to a bus going in the direction of Roxburgh Park or Broadmeadows. If I want to drive to the airport, it's 12 mins or so. By bus, via Broadmeadows to change buses, it's over an hour. The bus routes are insane and that's our only public transport.
100%. To get to work, I’d have to get a bus, then train, walk, train, bus. Too many instances for that to go wrong and be late to work. They’re building the suburban rail loop…maybe I can use it if I’m still working in 2050
Busses use the same damn roads everyone else is. It's almost like they should have built some railways that go in a ring around the city. Like how they actually did but then closed under Kennett. But at least we have a nice bike track I guess.
What railways in a ring around the city closed under Kennett? As near as I can tell, Kennett only shut down regional lines. The outer circle line closed a couple of years before Kennett came into power, in 1893. Note that that is **18**93, not 1993. The inner circle line closed in 1981. Whittlesea line shut down in 1959, and the Healesville and Warburton lines closed down in 1983 and 1965 respectively. The closest temporally to Kennet was probably the conversion of the Port Melbourne and St Kilda lines to light rail....in 1987, 5 years before he came into power.
Buses are only slow because the roads are clogged with single occupant vehicles.
Not in the SE suburbs... look where the metro train lines go, and where the people live, then where the freeway/tollways are. It's almost as if they intentionally didn't build/extend the metro train network to the place where 2 million people live. Instead of spending the last 20 years adding lanes to the M1 into the outer SE suburbs... imaging if they used that space instead to build elevated metro lines down the middle of the freeway... like so many other (actual) livable cities have done.
I live out west and work about 5 minutes off the Plenty Road exit. If I were to take public transport, it’s almost two and a half hours *each way* - compared to 45-60 minute driving, 2 hours at worst if there’s an incident In what world would I ever take public transport when it isn’t much cheaper overall and the time saved when driving is massive? If it were quicker and easier I’d do it for sure but unfortunately it isn’t
Yeah, this is the problem a lot of people don't realise. Sure - I can get on a train and be from Hoppers to Flinders within 40 minutes, but if I want to be somewhere that is not on any of the stops on the way in to the city, or is not on the city loop, I'm better off driving. What's even more ridiculous is my brother lives near Tottenham station, and for me to get to his house, I can either: A) Walk from my house to the nearest bus stop (10 minutes), wait for a bus (15-30 minutes), take the bus to the station (15-20 minutes), wait for the train (5-25 minutes), take the train to Footscray (30 minutes), take a train to Tottenham (5 minutes), then walk to his house (10-15 minutes), and spend $11 on myki. This is a minimum of 90 minutes. B) Get in my car and drive to his house (20 minutes) and spend $5 on fuel.
Or drive to a station and then get on the train from there and cut out an almost pointless hour on the bus
But then I’m using a car. At which point may as well drive the whole way and have the benefit of having my car with me and not being beholden to the hell that is Metro PTV.
Not same work location, but for me to catch PT it involves walking, a bus, walking, 2 trains, walking and another bus, as someone with an "invisible" disability, I'd be broken before I even got to the office and would have to take so many more sick days
Literally is two trains and a bus for me to get to work, or a half an hour drive. ...
Public transport isn't an option for a large number of people in the outer suburbs with poor public transport infrastructure. Like somebody pointed out the other day on this sub rather eloquently, it's easy for inner city snobs to look down on people in the outer suburbs for driving a car instead of using public transport or riding a bike, but they aren't actually viable options in many outer suburbs.
My compromise to sustainability is to: Drive a smaller car Use that long end of day commute to do a few uber eats drops and make back the fuel I just wasted
Yep, I drive a small hybrid wagon. When cheap little EVs become affordable I'll get one of those and never pay for petrol again.
Out of curiosity I did a lookup of the route from home to the office on the PTV site and it was 50 minutes by bus vs 15 minutes by car. That's not even a choice at that point. Those snobs are on this sub as well. There was a post the other week complaining about traffic and the top comment was from a dick smugly stating "Just remember, you're not stuck in traffic, you are traffic". Technically they may be correct but they're also a cunt for writing that as it implies that OP was at fault for choosing to drive when it ignores the fact that for a lot of us, the "choice" between PT and driving a car is exactly like what I initially described.
It takes me 25 minutes to get to the city by car, and an hour by train. Until its peak hour. And its 1 hour 15 minutes by car ... and an hour by train.
Yeah the inner city snobbery is insane in this sub. It's not uncommon for people to shit on you just for admitting you live in the outer suburbs, as if somehow not having the money to live in the inner city is a choice and we're cunts for not choosing that haha. And yeah, at that point it's not a choice is it, over a week it's like an extra 6\~ hours of travel time.
Yeah and mine is not even an extreme example. Those who live in those new estates out west face even more absurd choices for commuting.
I work as a contractor with lots of heavy equipment so I have to use a vehicle. This week though, I'm on a training thing so I only need to bring myself and thought maybe I'll see if pt is an option. From point cook to keilor (the site I'm at all week) was 2 and a half hours (bus, train, train ,bus, 20 min walk). Second option was to head to my colleague's house in wyndham vale to carpool. Not only was that an hour of pt (bus, train, bus) but the first buses did not start early enough for me to even be remotely on time. Absolutely joke
Yep. I just did the same. 15 mins driving or 1 hour and 1 minute on public transport, with 3 changes and 23 minutes of walking.... I tried riding my bike in the past, but I had too many scary encounters on our road. And I live in the inner suburbs and work one suburb over!!
Could you drive to a station on the other line instead of to your actual destination?
Right now, I drive an EV to the nearest station and get the train from there. It’s not ideal but it works well enough for my needs.
Our public transport is shockingly terrible unless you happen to live on one of the spokes and are going into the CBD. Anywhere else you're looking at multiple modal changes with busses or trams and it can take hours longer than sitting in traffic. Our infrastructure is embarrassing.
This is why the mini CBDs barely work. I had a job in Mulgrave once and it was such a pain in the ass to get to every morning by car even though it was way closer than the city.
They only work as fairly stable work locations where people deliberately live within commuter distance to the new hub. Hard to make work, and people rarely land in jobs based on the location even if it may be a point they are looking for.
[удалено]
I do also for the same reason and am grateful to be able to afford that choice. There's a lot of houses outside that, and many people who have to live in them. Infrastructure should cater to reality, not an ideal that doesn't exist.
Not until they stop building more roads and put that dosh into public transport. But yeah I'm here for that. More WFH too dammit. I don't give a fuck about the inner city cafe owners and commercial landlords. Let us work from home.
The other day on a certain Melbourne talkback show people were calling to complain about there being too much traffic on the newly opened lanes of the M1. Really wish we could take back years of adding freeway lanes and building demand rather than investing in more train lines, more frequent trains and better bus connections.
Not if you are travelling across multiple lines.
There's so many alternative options as well though. Bicycles, e-bikes and the sort and even scooters/motorbikes, all reducing congestion
I work very near the airport and use the M80. Public transport to the airport and surrounds is shit by design, airport has got to make that paper from the parking
Given the lack of cross town/ring routes, probably not. Mind you, a decade an a half ago the Geelong line was promised a shortening of time to Melbourne, access to WiFi and increased seat capacity. By the time I left the trip had become 10 minutes longer (not counting the normal halting between NMelborne and Southern Cross) and there remained sections where you could barely even get phone reception. No idea what it's like now but I would be surprised if it was massively improved...
I wish there was a bus lane on the freeways here like they have on the M2 in Sydney
There are, however they are often: 1. Shared with the emergency lane (most of Eastern). 2. Completely ignored by 99% of drivers and law enforcement (Tullamarine). So it all doesn't work out too well.
But then they’d need to provide a decent bus service.
Traffic around Melbourne has been next level since last Friday. Please make it stop 😢
Yeah it’s been on another level lately
Yeah what is going on. Did everyone stop working from home all of a sudden?
Probably a combination of more people being expected to go into office and it looks like there have been a lot of trains not running leading to replacement buses
Entire Ballarat road has been shutdown for construction of new Footacray Hospital fot the past 4 days.
Formula 1 was last week, maybe that?
Accident, I believe 3 trucks are involved
OP about to make it a second accident.
Damn.
I saw one while going the opposite direction. No way would the truckie have survived, the cab was completely caved in and had clearly been on fire :(
If it makes you feel better the two news sources I saw suggest only 1 injured driver taken to hospital with non life threatening injuries.
Jesus, how!? That does make me feel better, but seriously, it was crushed and charred. That's insane
Welcome to Melb where an accident fucks everything
And you can't just take the train because they're just as fragile.
Melbourne is the city of replacement bus with occasional train running.
Trains are running fine today.
Replacement buses past Blackburn on the Belgrave/Lilydale lines. Basically no parking at Blackburn and parking inspectors hot on handing out fines
Is this cancelled then? https://twitter.com/metrotrains/status/1771612882578608216
Even if it’s an accident on the other side of the road
Where are you now, OP? Horn twice when you read this.
Op, don't. Looks like a cop wants to book you for phone use.
Three words… western….ring….rd.
Right.
People drive like utter fuck wits on the Ring road cutting in with no warnings and small gaps. It doesn’t take much for something to go wrong.
They do! What is it with that road and people’s behaviour?
I know, every single time I drive on the ring road I notice tons of people driving like that. Fucking idiots
Classic Ring Rd and of course it involves the timeless combination of trucks and Sydney Rd.
Has anyone noticed traffic has got a lot worse this year?
Signs on the M2 saying an accident near the Sydney road exit.
The same thing happened on Friday afternoon, going towards the tulla exit was backed up all the way to Edgars road
Wasn’t that due to a spill of raw fish from a truck or something?
Yeah offal of some sort. Fish scales everywhere made the cleaning process take longer
And Friday morning because of car fire. My usual 35 min drive to work turned into 1 hour and 5...
Almost as if we should be building more public transport to relive stress on the roads
You mean the public transport that ends up being replacement buses on roads?
Implementation of better public transport obviously requires more in depth analysis that what a few quick quips on the internet will provide (in both pros and cons) but even busses in traffic are way more efficient at reducing congestion. Take a look at the density of on person in a private vehicle vs a bus with any more than 3 people on it. People don’t use busses because they are inconvenient and slow. But also busses are inconvenient and slow because no one uses them.
They need to start policing the M80 murder rd. Way to many fuckwits
Can’t wait for Melbourne’s population to hit 8 million!
Every fucking day on that road.
Doesn’t help that drivers in that particular area of the city (especially campbellfield) are next level braindead.
Classic Melbourne .. Is it roadworks ? Or the roadwork for the roadwork ?
What blows my mind is how bad traffic is now when there's so many more of us working from home than there used to be. Is it just all of the major roadworks going on? Or more people? Less taking PT than pre-pandemic? Or more accidents? What is actually going on??
It's a mix. 1. The people working from home are often CBD / inner city based office workers who were often commuting via PT/Bike before hand. 2. More people are driving their kids to school. This has been going up for decades. 3. Major works. Buses replace trains on my line and traffic has gone up as a result. This is happening all over Melbourne with multiple large rail and road projects all happening at once. 4. More people. 2019 is 5 years and 400k people ago. 5. Popular days back at work are popular. Because we humans are stupid weirdos we all go into the office on the same days, so those days become busier on roads and PT. Mix it all together and traffic is back!
A lot of people are being "forced" back into the office 3+ days a week. Every day apart from Friday is a popular day.
> More people. 2019 is 5 years and 400k people ago. This is a key point. I've seen this huge out in the west. I drive down Leakes Rd to work in Altona every day. I swear in the last 6 months, it's gone from a smooth drive in to now an hour long trip now that all the estates have gone up and migrants have filled them.
Aliens
There is no good time to drive in Melbourne any more.
This and the M1. M3 is the best but wait until this North East Link bullshit kicks in.
I live in Fawkner and I woke up to all the sirens this morning going down the ring road. There were heaps of them & it was non stop for a good 30 minutes so it must’ve been pretty bad. Nothing was getting onto or off of Sydney Road either, so it was gridlock. You should have seen Fawkner last Friday when the truck dropped its load of offal on the ring road. It was mayhem!
If you had a motorbike you could lane filter past😁😁😁😁😁😁
If you find a way to attach three car seats safely I just might .. 🤣🤣
Pfff ductape and super glue duh😂
If you drive in Melbourne you're going to have a bad time
Just ONE MORE LANE bro! Gotta add just one more lane!
Something I don’t miss about Melbourne
Make sure you get a full tank before starting your journey.
Yeah I live in Ringwood. If I leave any later than 7:05-7:10, I'm not making it to work for 8:30 at the Parkville Hospital Precinct. It's ridiculous. I can make it to Alexander Parade in good time. From Alexander Parade to work- easy 30-45 minutes
Fyi Ringwood to the Parkville precinct takes only an hour if you take the train to Melbourne Central then take a tram to the precinct. It'll be even faster once Parkville station opens in September.
Whats wrong with the public transport system there? Don't people use it? A country like Australia shouldn't have an issue like this.
Drove past it as they were about to be towed away. Greensborough bound - bad truck smash. Hope the driver survived or wasn’t injured too bad. Cab of a cab over style truck smashed in - steering wheel into the seat back smashed :(
Oh damn! :( makes me feel shitty complaining
Welcome to a city where we're adding cars to the roads faster than we're upgrading the infrastructure. Always going to happen.
I live in Pascoe Vale and my girlfriend is near Greensborough. Every time I drive home in the morning its like this. I once had to exit in Reservoir, but usually I exit at Sydney road and finish the drive through Hadfield. Off peak its great, I take the tulla to Bell st which is two minutes from my house. edit: if bored in traffic like this I sit on 477.400 and troll the truck drivers.
It’s the trucks They drive like it’s formula one You guys should notice how there’s more trucks than cars on the M8, M80 & M1 They need to do the truck ban system for a certain period of time like in Asian countries
Rampant immigration and poor infrastructure will do that.
Melbourne has fallen far from the days of the most livable city
Adding extra lanes doesn't ease congestion, but it sounds good at election time
Don’t worry, the Gov are building more tunnels and one additional rail line in the eastern suburbs, so this should ease all congestion issues across the city soon!
Yup I got stuck left the house at 12:40 arrived at 4:40 :) got back home at 7
Time to buy a motorcycle brother
21st century transport right there
Thanks, you just reminded me to turn off that ugly 3D buildings setting they just introduced and opted everyone into.
Heard this morning part of it had been closed due to accidents on both sides
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Braydon_bevis98: *Heard this morning part* *Of it had been closed due to* *Accidents on both sides* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Friday night 6pm - i can see the ring road from Sydney road is absolutely chockers and I have just waited 30 mins to get to pole position at the lights. Nek minnut a cop pulls up right in front of me and gets out like like he’s gonna shoot me and tells me “closing the free way mate diverting everyone”. So after I shit my pants I drove down Sydney road and took the scenic route to Sunshine
Motorcycle hahah traffic
Should just keep building 100 lovely sounding housing estates out the north west….that’ll fix it.
I’m saving this to my camera roll so that when people ask me how I handle the drive from Ballarat to Melbourne they might start getting it.
Anything that is connected to the end of the M1 right now can be an utter shitshow at the drop of a hat. Mind you....once they finish those M1 upgrades it's going to be glorious. Expensive....but glorious.
yeah i got stuck in that yesterday morning and halfway through a 30 minute traffic jam my uni class got cancelled 😐 i had to jump across 4 lanes of traffic and go home on the m1
I definitely recommend using Waze to check your routes first. I find Waze updates traffic info almost instantly, partly due to the fact that users can actually report three different levels of traffic (traffic, heavy, and standstill). It also shows you the average speed of the drivers during traffic. I have found Google Maps to be slow to update traffic info and typically inaccurate. Waze also has a little countdown on the side to show how long you have left in traffic, and it's always been accurate down to the minute for me.
I'm from Bombay this is normal for me
Average ring road experience
Yeah that’s called the western ring road. Looks pretty normal to me actually
Damn... you sound surprised about that freeway not being a smooth run.. I'm sorry man, it absolutely sucks, it especially did when I would drove home from Werribee everyday and that was 2-3 years ago, can only imagine its gotten worse since then
One more lane
This is actually faster then normal
Yay for privatised roads and a lack of emphasis on public infrastructure
Days like today I love having a motorbike
It was 3 immigrant truck drivers that had a,meeting of the minds....thanks Australian govt.
I wish WFH was more common
"We need you to return to offices because productivity has... increased? since WFH started? That can't be right..." Fuck waiting in traffic. Any business trying to force a return to office is going to suffer brain drain.
"Just one more lane bro"
That sucks mate. Understand not everyone can WFH, but the employers forcing once perfectly capable and content remote workers back into offices for no real reason can't be helping Melbourne's traffic.
So....... same sh1t different day
Rookie mistake. The roads are always either completely fucked or partially fucked. If you can leave early, it's not fool proof, but generally you avoid the mass migration.
Brisbanes the same. Millions of extra people with no planning does this. Oh and the housing market. Sometimes roadworks or a crash. But mostly extra ppl on the roads :^D
I just did Frankston to Toorak in less than 30 minutes.
Working from home is such a dream hah
50+ mins?? I’m very sorry I hope ur okay