‘Our city is dying on its feet’: Matthew Guy’s plan to ease Melbourne’s traffic congestion

More than 50 dangerous traffic light and roundabout intersections are set to be removed if the Coalition wins the state election next year.

This morning Opposition leader Matthew Guy spoke to Ross and John about the party’s plan to combat congestion.

He said that focusing on our freeways is not enough to ease the city’s traffic woes.

“It’s not just our freeway infrastructure… it’s actually our arterial roads where the biggest problems are.”

Under the plan, the 55 intersections found to be the most dangerous in the city, as identified by RACV red spot data, will be replaced with free flowing underpasses.

Mr Guy told Ross and John that putting in the underpasses would be “a lot cheaper, and a lot quicker” than the level crossing works currently underway across the city.

He said that calls to focus on public transport, in order to reduce the number of cars on our roads, are unrealistic.

“We’ve got to cater for what we have got as a known entity now, and that is 75 per cent of us driving to work, and at the moment our city is dying on its feet because it’s so gridlocked…We’ve got to deal with the problem we have. We’ve been designed on the same model as a North American city, not Copenhagen or Helsinki.”

“If we don’t do something about our traffic intersections now they’re just going to get worse, it’s as simple as that.”

Ross raised concerns that the underpasses would just get drivers to the next bottleneck quicker, but Mr Guy said that investment in traffic light technology will ensure that doesn’t happen.

The Coalition’s plan will include the upgrading of lights from current analogue technology, which only allows for pre-programmed light sequences, to computerised technology which can sense the amount of traffic present and adjust accordingly.

Press PLAY below to hear Ross and John’s interview with Matthew Guy.