Roads Minister Tim Pallas has announced that studies will continue to assess the viability of linking the Eastern Freeway with CityLink via a proposed tunnel. The tunnel will run from Collingwood to Flemington, under the Melbourne General Cemetery and via a lost underground civilization of cave-dwelling mole men.
“This is a practical, real-world solution to Melbourne’s traffic problems,” declared Pallas. “There are a lot of people out there who would like to see us pursue all sorts of fantasy-land proposals, like train lines to Cranbourne East and South Morang, or peak hour trains less than 20 minutes apart on the Upfield Line. But we aren’t interested in dreams. We are interested in feasible solutions, like the Collingwood – Moletopia – Flemington link.”
Pallas denied suggestions the government was focussed on grand-scale investment in road projects of dubious merit, at the expense of meaningful investment in public transport. “Look, there are those who suggest that investing in road infrastructure merely encourages heavier use of those roads, and represents a poor long-term investment given the challenges society will face as oil becomes more scarce and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions becomes ever more pressing. Those people just don’t know enough about mole men.”
The proposed tunnel would run from the end of the Eastern Freeway to Flemington. It would be a Public / Private / Mole Man Partnership, spreading the economic burden of infrastructure investment between government, the private sector, and a secretive race of burrowing human-mole hybrids. “PPMMPs are the way of the future. We can utilise private capital and mole labour to reduce the burden on taxpayers.”
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Pallas’ thinking has been backed by business groups, and a detailed report by business leader Sir Rob Burrington and Mole Emperor Zandar the Merciless. Their conclusions have been further bolstered by research from Random Economics, which estimated that the existing bottleneck between the Eastern Freeway and CityLink currently costs the Victorian economy up to $560 million annually. Random Economics are a respected firm, whose unverifiable valuations of unquantifiable economic impacts contribute an estimated $60 million to the economy each year.
The government has not been phased by threats of legal action from rival roll road operators, whose contracts gives them right to financial redress if the government builds alternative road routes. Pallas denies such clauses throw a cloud over future PPPs or PPMMPs. “These private corporations are of great assistance in achieving improved infrastructure assets. Agreeing to not improve our infrastructure assets is a small price to pay to achieve that benefit.”
The government is similarly relaxed about concerns that the tunnel might allow the mole men, who have been kept imprisoned in their subterranean kingdom since the dawn of time, to rise to the surface with conquering armies and enslave humanity.
“We’ve looked at that,” said a source at VicRoads. “All our modelling shows that once we add in all the traffic from Eastlink, the whole system will be so congested that there would be ample time to head off an invasion force.”
Originally published in the “Clause 101” column in Planning News 34, no. 2 (March 2008): 29.