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We need more construction in Melbourne. Desperately.
Yesterday, I drove a whole block without being stopped by a traffic control worker. Last weekend, the tradies doing road works on my street didn’t start the jack hammer until 9.01am. That’s a whole minute they let my family sleep. They should be kicked out of the union for that.
Commuters wait for bus replacements during road and rail closures during Westgate Tunnel works. Credit: Penny Stephens
There are even rumours that construction workers in Parkville all took public transport into work, so they didn’t snatch up all the parking spaces that local businesses rely on for staff and customers. What has this city come to?
Thankfully, this morning I had to take seven detours just to drive a kilometre down the road. For a moment, I was worried that Melbourne was becoming livable again.
Look, I get it. When you have great roads, they need to be maintained. When infrastructure breaks down it needs to be repaired – often urgently. When local councils have to spend their budgets before the end of the financial year, they may splash out on a fancy new park bench or a hideous art installation in Fitzroy.
State governments campaign for office with sexy buzzwords like “expansion” and “development for the future” because they’re a lot more exciting than more balanced ideas like “maintenance” and “let’s take it easy for a while”. Of course, we’re going to keep developing the city. We’re not Hobart for goodness’s sake.
But when does the serenity of day-to-day life factor into the overall construction equation? We’re lucky to live in such an affluent city, certainly, but surely, there are ways to make the inevitable disturbances from construction more bearable.
Perhaps instead of subjecting us to the harrowing experience of replacement buses for months on end, the train line can splurge on one of those fun disco limousines from time to time. Maybe when one of your neighbours is building a house, you get to record all the construction noise and play it back to them once they move in. When a road is closed for construction work, the businesses affected by it should each be sent a Millennial to teach them how to sell their goods on Facebook Marketplace. These may not be real solutions, but I’ll leave those to the taxpayer-funded city council members to come up with.
Melburnians have become accustomed to road works in recent years.Credit: Darrian Traynor
Melbourne, which still has big projects like the Westgate Tunnel, the North East Link and Level Crossing Removals ahead of us for many years, doesn’t have to hog all the development of new housing and infrastructure in Victoria either. Let’s relocate some of the action to other cities like Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo – their residents deserve to be woken up at 7am by power tools too.
They could do with a few more leisure centres, playgrounds, and Lego Lands. It may even go some way towards encouraging young couples to actually move out of Melbourne and buy a home somewhere they can comfortably work and raise a family – without losing out on all the benefits of a cosmopolitan city.
Yes, Melbourne’s got all the cool laneway cafes and bars, but the country towns will catch up if we stop building 20 train stations between Flinders Street and Melbourne Central and allocate a few dollars towards development in other cities.
The new infrastructure in Melbourne will be great. No doubt. I’m glad we’re building a better future for our children… but when does that future actually get here? Twenty years? Forty years? I’m beginning to think there is no real end goal for all this town planning and that the City of Melbourne is really just like a Boomer renovating every room in their house over and over so they have something to talk about to their friends.
All I’m advocating for is a better balance between progress and peacefulness.
At least I can find some solace in the fact that I probably won’t ever have to put up with the construction of a train line to the airport in my lifetime because they never seem to be able to get around to that.
Simon Taylor is a Melbourne-born comedian who became the first-ever Australian to perform stand-up on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.
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