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Wiam Bou Karram’s morning commute is often a frustrating one, as he tackles one of the city’s busiest highways on the 14-kilometre trip from his home in Moorabbin to work in South Melbourne.
“You’ve got three lanes, and they’re usually bumper to bumper,” he says of the daily grind.
“There are a lot of traffic lights, and a lot of intersections, so you’re stopping every few kilometres.”
The Frankston train line is right at his doorstep, but it doesn’t stop anywhere near the street his job is on.
To rub salt into the wound, things could have been totally different – for him and tens of thousands of other Melburnians.
A century ago, chief engineer Tom Percival Strickland suggested the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board significantly widen its network at the same time it was converting its archaic cable tram fleet to electric.
In 1923, the routes stretched 201 kilometres across the city from Black Rock to Fawkner, and Box Hill South to Footscray.
Strickland had grand plans to more than double that, to 428 kilometres, and while he successfully converted or created 87 kilometres of electric tramways in his time, other tram line extensions were removed entirely from his vision.
The network plateaued at 250 kilometres, and while it’s still the largest urban tram network in the world, carrying 200 million passengers a year, it could have been much larger.
Present-day Melburnians viewing the 1923 map of Strickland’s grand ambitions may find themselves mourning lost opportunity. Punt Road, Bell Street, Footscray, Williamstown, Sunshine and Reservoir all could have been strands on the tram network’s spiderweb.
Malcolm Rowe, of Melbourne’s Tramway Museum, said when Strickland’s upgrades were jettisoned, parts of Melbourne were condemned to slower commutes.
“It would have provided a good basis for the current city to have services where there are major gaps now,” he said, singling out Monash University and Doncaster.
Melbourne’s present-day planners are now asking the same questions Stickland did. Where can we, and should we, put more tram lines? Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s some overlap with what the chief engineer originally planned.
Bou Karram could have been gliding to his job on a tram from South Road, Moorabbin, which Strickland envisioned being connected to the rest of the network along with nearby North Road, Bluff Road and Hampton Street.
“I would definitely use a tram if it were well-planned, separate from the other lanes of traffic so it doesn’t create new [congestion] problems,” Bou Karram said.
“I always prefer to use public transport; it’s more peaceful.”
Shaping the city is a key topic of The Age and the University of Melbourne’s forum, Melbourne Assembly, a three-day event in October bringing together some of the world’s brightest minds in city planning, innovation, education, arts and sport to discuss ideas for the city’s future.
In a vote reflecting the type of city our readers value and envision for their future, extending the city’s tram network was the third most popular idea of the readers’ wishlist of big ideas.
Strickland’s agenda for Melbourne’s public transport came to a halt for a surprisingly simple reason.
“Buses got better,” Rowe explains.
The same year Strickland left his role – 1938 – his boss, Hector Hercules Bell, travelled to Europe for inspiration.
Until then, Bell had been continuing the work of converting Melbourne’s cable trams to electric, but he arrived just in time to see the UK ripping up its tramways to replace them with buses.
In a cable back to Melbourne, Bell wrote he felt trams were too expensive to justify compared to buses, which had recently undergone “rapid development and improvement”.
In the following decades, Melbourne embraced car travel over public transport – the exception being route 86, which now runs from Bundoora to Victoria Harbour, where Bell was forced to put trams back in the ’50s after buses proved unable to handle passenger numbers.
“Drivers were starting to say, ‘We need more access to street space than you’re giving us at the moment, and we want to push the trams aside’,” said Melbourne University urban transport researcher John Stone, who added that it became hard to justify spending on public transport at a time when Melburnians weren’t using it.
“The tramways were a big institution, and they didn’t take seriously the threat from cars. They were manoeuvred out of the way by people saying, ‘we need somebody to build this road’, and so we really lost that ability for public transport to compete and for a long time through the ’70s and into the ’80s.”
But as traffic increased and costs for car travel increased at pace along with Melbourne’s population, enthusiasm for public transport grew with it.
Tram extensions were promised by the Greens and Labor ahead of the 2014 and 2018 elections respectively, but the footprint of Melbourne’s tram network has remained largely the same shape for decades, with notable exceptions in Box Hill, Vermont South and Docklands.
This has not gone unnoticed, with Infrastructure Victoria last November urging the government to extend eight tram routes by 2030, to areas where it is planning for thousands more homes.
“These extensions will give developers the confidence to build new homes in these precincts … support local jobs and create better connected communities,” Infrastructure Victoria chief executive Dr Jonathan Spear said.
Among the precincts Infrastructure Victoria said needed connecting was Moorabbin, one of the government’s activity centres which is slated for more than 5000 new homes in buildings up to 12 storeys.
Ironically, the proposal closely mirrors what Strickland had planned all those years ago: Route 64 at East Brighton would be extended south to come down the Nepean Highway, past Moorabbin train station and terminate near the new Holmesglen TAFE.
Bou Karram said it wouldn’t just be workers like him that would benefit from such a move.
“In this area, there is only one supermarket. For people who live further away from it than me, a tram is definitely a viable option for them to access it,” he said.
“And if they’re struggling to get to the train station, they can use a tram. How would they get there unless they have a car or ride-share?”
A government spokesperson did not comment directly on these proposals, but pointed to the recent $1.85 billion investment in G-Class trams and its plans to make tram stops more accessible on certain routes.
“We will continue to plan for further improvements to our public transport network as Victoria grows,” they said.
The government announced plans to abolish Infrastructure Victoria late last month, as suggested by a public service review. It is yet to respond to the 30-year infrastructure strategy from November last year, which included tramline extensions.
Melbourne Assembly will be held from October 19 to October 21. More information is available on the Melbourne Assembly website, including special offers for Age subscribers
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