Melbourne's Metro Tunnel is not yet open for service but I was fortunate enough to get on a tour of Anzac station on St Kilda Rd near the Shrine of Remembrance. This was offered to attendees of the Australasian Transport Research Forum conference as well as some others (like me).
The station is still a construction site but is nearly finished. In this video I walk from the surface, down to the concourse, then down to the platforms, then back to the concourse then out again to the surface. This station will be a major interchange point with close integration between train, tram and a couple of bus routes.
The Metro Tunnel is scheduled to open next year.
It will definitely greatly speed transport to the university and health precinct at Parkville as well as jobs and apartments around Domain. Other assured benefits include relief to crowded trams on the Swanston St corridor and increased potential to develop the Arden precinct due to its vastly improved accessibility. Improved reliability for northern group trains is likely as of the northern group only Craigieburn and Upfield lines remain in the City Loop, with busy Sunbury line trains now running via the Metro Tunnel.
Potential wider Metro Tunnel project benefits include more services on lines like Craigieburn and Upfield (both of which have long suffered timetables that compare poorly with the all week frequent and marginal seated Frankston line) and substantial tram network reform. The latter being made possible by (a) the potential to move some routes from Swanston St to better served job-rich areas like the western part of the CBD (which is currently underserved) and (b) create short links to improve connectivity to emerging precincts just outside the Hoddle grid.
The realisation of such wider benefits (such as the business case relies on to make the project 'stack up') depends on the specifications of the timetable we'll get. These are not yet publicly known. Given the post-pandemic shift to working from home and the rise of weekend and evening CBD activity, off-peak service levels are as important as traditional weekday peak frequencies.
The Sydney Metro experience has shown this strongly with them now having a 5 min interpeak frequency. And Perth can claim a 7.5 min 7 day frequency at some of their inner stations.
Key issues for our Metro Tunnel and related timetables include:
(a) off-peak frequencies on the Metro Tunnel (a 10 min frequency is probably OK for stations like Watergardens and Dandenong but must be 5 min or better before considering significant tram reform; people won't go down to deep stations to face a 9 min wait for a one or two station trip);
(b) whether the abovementioned off-peak frequencies will apply at currently underserved times including evenings and Sunday mornings (where services have traditionally been inadequate to support major city activity and major events);
(c) the extent to which all day/all week frequency uplifts are confined to the Metro Tunnel lines or include others like Craigieburn, Sandringham and Upfield as assumed in the 2016 business case); and
(d) the extent to which the timetable to be introduced for the Metro Tunnel sets off a process that revives the stalled 2012 Rail Network Development Plan to deliver all week 10 minute frequencies across the metropolitan rail network (starting with the very cheap to upgrade service to Ringwood and including other key lines like Mernda and Werribee).
It is answers to questions like these that opposition MPs could have sought to get from DTP and government at the recent PAEC rather than playing 'gotchas' on train and network interoperability that was never a design intention.
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