A home and heritage buildings will be destroyed as part of the Yarraville Level Crossing Removal project but it still won’t deliver a ramp to cross Anderson Street.
By Ryan O’Sullivan
Let’s get one thing out of the way first.
Yes, my house is one of the properties marked for acquisition and demolition as part of the Anderson Street Level Crossing Removal Project. My family has spent nearly twenty years restoring 25 Birmingham Street. We’d be devastated to lose it.
But this stopped being about my house a long time ago.
To be clear, I support removing the Anderson Street level crossing. The crossing is going. Everyone knows that.
The real question is whether it is removed in the best possible way and leaves the best possible legacy for Yarraville.
As an urban designer, planning, design and consultation is what I do for a living. Most design problems can be solved technically. The harder question is whether the solution being proposed is the right one.
What concerns me most about the Yarraville project is not that a decision has been made. It is how it appears to have been made.
I met privately with LXRP the day before community consultation commenced. During that meeting I was advised that the preferred concept had already been locked in. LXRP also confirmed that the acquisition and demolition of 25 Birmingham Street forms part of that preferred design and that compulsory acquisition steps were already underway.
According to LXRP, the preferred design was settled in March. Before consultation began.
Think about what that means.
The community is just now being asked to provide feedback on a design that was effectively locked in before the community was invited to comment on it.
During that same meeting LXRP referred to the many alternative concepts that had been considered and discarded. I repeatedly requested access to those concepts, the option assessments and the technical evaluations used to justify the preferred design. Those requests were declined.
LXRP has given the community four weeks to respond to a proposal that will permanently change Yarraville. In my case, the advertised schematic plans show my home sitting beneath what is effectively a staircase graphic. That graphic represents a decision that could ultimately lead to the acquisition and demolition of a property that has been part of Yarraville’s urban fabric for over 100 years and part of my family’s life for more than twenty.
Yet I have not been provided with the assessments that led to that decision.
No option assessment. No accessibility assessment. No heritage advice. No comparison of alternative layouts. No explanation. Yet the public is still being asked to make submissions.
So what exactly am I supposed to respond to in the planning submission? How am I expected to prepare an informed submission within four weeks when the information needed to evaluate the proposal remains unavailable? Is an independent enquiry and advisory committee going to be appointed?
Am I expected to commission my own accessibility advice? Heritage advice? Engineering review? Further, is every affected resident and trader expected to undertake their own investigation simply to understand whether the preferred design is justified?
That is not meaningful consultation. It is consultation in form rather than substance.
During my meeting with LXRP, I was advised that it is technically feasible to shift the underpass 20 metres further south, far enough to avoid impacting my property. I was also advised that doing so would increase the complexity and cost of the project.
That raises an obvious question.
If a technically feasible alternative exists that could avoid the demolition of homes and businesses, what analysis was undertaken to weigh those impacts against the additional project cost? The community does not know because the analysis has not been released.
The accessibility outcome deserves far greater scrutiny.
Most people in Yarraville probably assume this project delivers an accessible crossing at Anderson Street.
It does not. The only step-free crossing in the heart of the village is being moved away from the heart of the village.
Under the LXRP preferred design, the fully accessible ramp is located 170 metres north of the current crossing. At Anderson Street itself, users are expected to rely on stairs and a single lift. That matters because Anderson Street is the historic east-west spine of the village and the natural pedestrian desire line around which Yarraville has evolved for more than a century.
Good accessibility design puts the accessible route on the desired line. This design moves it away.
Anyone who uses Melbourne’s rail network knows lifts fail. When they do, parents with prams, people in wheelchairs, mobility-impaired residents and children on bikes face a detour of approximately 380 metres from the Anderson Street crossing, all while pedestrian movement is drawn away from village traders.
By adopting this design, LXRP is effectively saying those impacts are acceptable.
The obvious question is why. Why move the accessible route away from the place where people already cross? And where is the assessment that justifies that decision?
Then there is the heritage impact.
The project proposes demolition of buildings – Dad & Dave’s and neighbouring businesses including Wee Jeannie. These buildings form part of the Victorian Heritage Register listing for the Yarraville Railway Station Complex.
Again, the question is simple. Where is the heritage assessment? Surely there is an alternative. The community is being asked to accept the demolition of state heritage-listed buildings without being given access to the advice that supports that decision.
That is not transparency. That is trust us. And trust us is not good enough.
The reality is that better outcomes are indeed possible. An alternative concept retains direct accessibility at Anderson Street while avoiding the demolition of homes and businesses currently in the project’s path. And this is not a fantasy. It is a genuine design response prepared by people who design places like this for a living.
Will such an outcome cost more? Possibly. But if communities across Melbourne have received level crossing removals measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars, why should Yarraville be expected to accept a solution that compromises accessibility, removes heritage buildings and acquires homes and businesses if a better outcome is achievable?
Public infrastructure should not be judged solely on the basis of the cheapest option, it should be judged on the legacy it leaves behind. Victorians have spent billions of dollars removing level crossings across Melbourne, and individual projects have routinely cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet in Yarraville we are being told that homes must go, heritage buildings must go and accessibility must be compromised.
Why? Because no better solution exists? Or because this is the cheapest solution?
Those are very different things.
If communities elsewhere were worthy of investment that protected neighbourhood character and delivered high-quality public outcomes, why should Yarraville settle for less? I do not know the answer because the assessments have not been released, and if cost has influenced these decisions, then the community deserves to know that.
There is an irony in all of this. For years Australians have laughed at The Castle. We treated it as a quirky story about somebody else’s battle with compulsory acquisition.
I thought The Castle was fiction. I can say with certainty that the sequel, The Castle: Yarraville, is not. The difference is that Darryl Kerrigan knew exactly why his house was being taken.
Yarraville residents still do not know the full basis on which the LXRP preferred design was selected and are being given just four weeks to respond while the assessments underpinning the preferred design remain unavailable. LXRP says these documents cannot be released, yet I have been shown detailed plans identifying the removal of my home.
If those plans can be shared with me, why is the broader community being denied access to the information needed to properly understand and assess the proposal?
You cannot ask a community for informed feedback while withholding the information required to form an informed view.
Pause the process.
Release the assessments, the comparisons, and the evidence, and then give the community enough time to properly review them and form an opinion.
A level crossing is removed once, but Yarraville will live with the consequences forever.
That is exactly why we must get it right.
To learn more head to www.lxray.com.au
