By Ed Harcourt
Comedian, writer and activist Stella Young said it in 2012: “My disability exists not because I use a wheelchair, but because the broader environment isn’t accessible.”
The LXRP is about to build inaccessibility into the Yarraville community on purpose.
Crossing the rail line at Anderson Street today involves about twenty metres. Boom gates up, walk across, you’re at the shops.
But under the LXRP’s crossing removal plan wheelchair users – or anyone using any wheels – it becomes 370 metre round trip, one way.
The plan gives Yarraville station one accessible ramp, 170 metres north at Goulburn Street, nowhere near where people actually cross. At Anderson Street itself, there will only be stairs, or a lift. If that lift is broken, vandalised, or simply jam-packed at peak hour when demand is high, you take the long way round, you wait, or you just don’t cross.
And to build the ramp in the wrong place, the government will acquire and demolish my neighbour’s – Yuko and Ryan – family home on Birmingham Street.
This is a trade. A cheaper, easier, quicker, nastier build now, in exchange for a long-term cost carried by Yarraville and by people with disabilities, every day, for decades. Cheapest to build is not value for money. Once it’s built, we’re stuck with it.
So how have they got away with it?
In 2024 the government introduced a law allowing extra scope to be added to a transport project that has already been declared. It said this was needed because some works are “not significant enough to be declared a project on its own”, such as adding a carpark to a level crossing removal project.
The LXRP used that law to quietly bolt Yarraville’s Anderson Street onto the much larger Hudsons Road project in Spotswood, kilometres down the line, rather than declaring it a project in its own right. The government has effectively deemed Yarraville Village an ancillary project. Does this mean the Yarraville Village’s level crossing removal is equal to being merely a carpark?
It matters because declaring a project in its own right ordinarily triggers an assessment of its significance to the community. Spotswood’s assessment was done back in 2023, before this law existed. Did any of it address Yarraville? Yarraville is playing second fiddle to a project down the line, and that may explain the apparent lack of assessment. It may explain how a ramp ends up 170 metres from where it needs to be.
I am not a lawyer, architect, designer or planner. But in my work as a medical scientist, when there is uncertainty, I learned long ago to do my homework and read the standard.
For public transport, the Disability Discrimination Act provides for legally enforceable standards: the DSAPT, and in Victoria the NTS-002. Reading the NTS-002 I identified 28 clauses that raise serious questions about this design covering: ramp placement, station access, the route people already take, safety, amenity and heritage.
On the layout of lifts, stairs and ramps, it says “Consultation must be undertaken early in the design process to seek feedback from impacted communities”.
Was that done? An independent accessibility review, commissioned by my neighbors and I, found the preferred design is not fit for purpose, with a single point of failure at the lift. It found alternative concepts placing ramps at Anderson Street give a clear accessibility advantage, and they take no homes or businesses.
We know they can do a better job, because they’ve done it elsewhere. LXRP told us it couldn’t build a simple at-grade pedestrian crossing here – that’s not what we do, they said. Turns out, it is planning one at Mentone. It built five at Chelsea. The cost of an at-grade pedestrian cross is trivial compared to the cost of acquiring a home, knocking it down and tunnelling under the line for a ramp design that still isn’t fit for purpose. LXRP tells other communities at-grade pedestrian crossings are safe and accessible. They told Yarraville something entirely different.
If the government did proper assessments and applied the standards, show us. Let the public see the professional advice. If it didn’t, go back to the drawing board and consult us properly, especially people with disabilities, before anything is locked in.
This crossing will be rebuilt once in a century. Build it once. Build it right.
