Re: Surrey Hills - another crossing failure II

["Michael Walker" <walker@hotkey.net.au>]

>In their own relative way all the roads you talk about are busy. Union Rd
and
>Mont Albert Rd are very useful diversions away from Canterbury Road and
>Whitehorse Rd. I lived in Box Hill for many years until 1972 and still
regularly
>visit because the family home is still there. I would rate Grimshaw St busy
now
>because of the ring road but when it is extended do you not think that the
>problem will be reduced.
>
I agree with what you say about the diversions although Canterbury Road is
not too bad (I use the road to go from East Camberwell to Deakin in Burwood
at various times of the day including peak hour). Canterbury Roads capacity
could be improved by extending the clearways which would probably be cheaper
for improving capacity in the area than lowering Mont Albert and Union
Roads. Until of course they improve public transport in the area...

Whilst some traffic was initially removed making Grimshaw Street quieter
(certainly during peak hour), Grimshaw Street is at least as busy as
previously if not more so. Once the Ring Road extended to Bundoora and then
to Thomastown, more traffic used Grimshaw Street because of the shopping
centre which is now more or less at the end of the ring road and the only
alternatives to Greensborough Plaza are strip shops (dying because of large
shopping centres and usually don't have the sort of choice and variety of
shops a large SC has) or Northland or Epping Plaza. Northland is a pain to
get to by road (and public transport) and probably takes just as long as
Greensborough unless you live fairly close and Epping Plaza isn't as big as
Greensborough Plaza.

In a nutshell, the shopping centre has induced more traffic due to the Ring
Road. Just try heading west then turn right onto the Ring Road about
4-5.30pm on a Saturday afternoon.

The other reason why it's so busy is because it's so hard to get onto the
Ring Road at the roundabout (although has improved since they put in the
overhead lane markers) so a lot of people go the quicker route through
Greensborough - again along Grimshaw Street.

To try and put this thread back onto a related topic - instead of building
huge car parks and pushing councils to build larger roads, when will traffic
generators such as universities and shopping centres realise that another
option is to subsidise or even directly provide good public transport to
their centres. The only example I have seen is the partnership National Bus
appeared to have with Westfield - I am sure it is no coincidence that in
their first route reshuffle of the old Met Doncaster routes, many routes
seemed to focus away from Box Hill and onto Shoppingtown - certainly many of
the local shopper type routes seemed to.

I am not sure how much Box Hill Central counts as despite being built over a
railway station, it was done by the public transport authority rather than a
shopping centre developer.

On this score though, Melbourne Central would certainly count , indeed if it
weren't for the greed of the Labour Govt at the time, Museum would have been
renamed when the shopping centre opened.

Are there any universities directly on a rail route? The only one that comes
to mind is Swinburne (right next to Glenferrie station) although the
railways missed their opportunity for years treating it as a local station
only except to cater to private school kids for an hour in the morning and
an hour in the evening when many expresses would stop.