Wednesday, 22 February 2023

Kalkallo traffic congestion

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (17:48): (55) I seek the action of the Minister for Roads and Road Safety to urgently look at the traffic chaos in my Northern Metro suburb of Kalkallo and to come with me for a visit at peak hour in the morning. I say this because it takes residents sometimes over an hour in the morning to get out of their own estate because there is only one road in and one road out. Many migrants and young families have secured the great Australian dream in the suburb of Kalkallo, but it has now become the great Labor nightmare while they are sitting in traffic every morning because this government is too slow keeping up with demand for infrastructure and there has been a lack of oversight in the planning system. Here we have a swathe of new homes feeding into a single-lane road where vehicles get pincer trapped before they can even get to a major roundabout that feeds on to the Hume Highway and Donnybrook Road. The volume of traffic from the other directions is making it really tough to get out of the roundabout. ABC reporter Margaret Paul described the chaos, saying:

I’ve seen people overtaking on the wrong side of the road and driving onto the grass to turn left. The frustration is intense …

and then later finding a traffic queue for residents to get out of their own housing estate has grown to over 1 kilometre.

Clearly locals are frustrated. It is the highest source of inquiries to my office. People are absolutely sick of this traffic bottleneck. After the recent grassfire at Beveridge last week my residents are very, very concerned. What if there was a ‘leave now’ alert just down the road from Beveridge in Kalkallo? It is a catastrophe waiting to happen. The Andrews government wants to pretend like this issue came out of nowhere, but when these new suburbs are going in that include thousands of people, surely there is some sort of planning oversight on this. They pretend like it has come out of nowhere. I know the member for Kalkallo has. But they are repeating the same mistakes in a different part of the world just further south with their Craigieburn West precinct structure plan, which they pushed through against the wishes of the council, because they have got a single-lane Mickleham Road which they are not even duplicating all the way up to Craigieburn Road. So they are repeating the same mistakes. Where is the proper planning? It is incumbent on the government to properly plan these suburbs and model them before residents move in, not after. Labor must now fast-track the upgrades of Donnybrook Road and the Mitchell Street roundabout, including the duplication and other works of Donnybrook Road to improve traffic flow for my residents in Melbourne’s north.