Fusion has lodged a submission in support of Stage 2 of the Mickleham Road Upgrade. While clearing immediate bottlenecks is a near-term necessity for growth corridors, we are calling for strict provisions to safeguard future public and active transport connectivity.
Our Position on the Mickleham Road Upgrade:
We cannot let perfect be the enemy of good when outer-suburban drivers are trapped in daily gridlock. Lane duplication on Mickleham Road is a necessary pragmatic step—much like the urgent need to expand the Ferris Road freeway overpass in Melton—but road widening alone is not a complete solution to systemic transport failure.
1. Pragmatic Infrastructure vs. Future-Proofed Design
Dumping more cars onto expanded asphalt without a long-term plan will eventually trigger induced demand, filling the new lanes and pushing the bottleneck further down the corridor. Fusion supports the capacity upgrade in the near term, provided that the project boundary explicitly preserves alignment space for future high-frequency transit links.
The Fusion Proviso: The outer lanes or adjacent reservation space must be future-proofed for quick conversion into dedicated bus priority corridors, ensuring public transport can reliably bypass traffic as the population continues to scale.
2. Fully Segregated Active Transport
The inclusion of walking and cycling paths in the planning documents is a step in the right direction. However, to ensure these paths are genuinely usable for families and commuters, they must be physically separated and heavily protected from the six lanes of high-speed vehicle traffic, rather than integrated as unshielded concrete pavements directly beside the curb.
3. Solving the Core Planning Deficit
Fixing individual road bottlenecks treats the symptom of the crisis, not the cause. True urban mobility requires the state to shift away from car-dependent 'dormitory suburb' layouts. We must pair essential road upgrades with walkable, mixed-use land zoning and high-frequency, reliable local bus networks so that driving becomes a choice rather than a penalty.
Fusion advocates for a balanced approach to infrastructure: clearing immediate congestion for drivers while actively laying the physical groundwork for a connected, transit-oriented future.