Melbourne could become "Next LA"

“Melbourne cannot survive this kind of sprawl - we are going to end up the way American cities are going. It is a horrendous future and the Government has got to stop it happening,” RMIT University associate professor Michael Buxton said.

via theage.com.au

I’ve been saying this since I got here. Melbourne’s sprawl is embarrassingly huge, and there are huge environmental, social and financial problems with that. The Government has warned the community sector that funding will not be increasing at the same rate as the population - and for the same reasons, infrastructure spending will be heading in the same direction.

A ticketing system and half-a-tunnel will not do anything to help the situation with public transport - and that’s just one aspect of the problem.

Vancouver’s able to contain its growth, because there are physical limitations on three sides: water, mountains and Americans. Melbourne doesn’t really have those kinds of limitations. Whenever we run out of space, the easiest (and most guaranteed not to piss off inner Melbourne voters) solution is to just say that Melbourne is allowed to take up more space. Wrong answer.

We need to go up, not out. Density must be increased around transportation corridors. New single-family dwellings within a certain radius of the CBD (and other activity centres) ought to be actively discouraged through zoning, taxes and fees. To preserve historical elements of the city, some exceptions will need to be made. By and large though, what we’re doing is simply not sustainable.