Submission Cover Sheet Sub no: West Gate Tunnel Project IAC 416 Request to be heard?: No, Full Name: Maila Katrin Stivens Organisation: No Address: Affected property: Attachment: engage.vic.gov.au Comments: Even in its own terms, the planned tunnel will be a failure. Over the past 30 years, Victoria ha underinvested in its public transport, and built freeways and toll roads that only add to traffic congestion, pollution and exacerbate climate change: travel speeds get more and more slow. All traffic planning shows that building more toll roads only adds to congestion. The government’s own modelling showing that travel times on the West Gate Freeway, the Bolte Bridge and Geelong Road will be slower a er the West Gate Tunnel toll road is built than they are today.The main question is: why is transport planning for Melbourne being left to Transurban? Transurban makes money by building toll roads that do nothing but shift traffic problems on to a new bottleneck. The solution to that new bottleneck is yet another toll road. This has happened again and again: with CityLink, EastLink and now the proposed West Gate Tunnel and North East Link. Instead of outsourcing transport planning for Melbourne’s west to Transurban. In a secretive process, the government needs to take direct control of making the city safer, healthier and more liveable. Transurban dismissed alternatives, such as more public transport or a new rail tunnel from Newport to Southern Cross Station. routes such as Sunshine Road.Legally, it is suggested, Transurban has to stop charging tolls on CityLink as early as 2025. But in order to fund the West Gate Tunnel, the government wishes to allow Transurban to toll CityLink for an extra decade. This means that people who never go to Melbourne’s west will continuing paying Transurban every time they use CityLink, for many years. This is clearly nothing but a profit-driven grab for billions of dollars by Transurban.Far from least is the queson of the impact of the project on both the climate and the population’s health. The West Gate Tunnel is expected to create 457,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases from construction alone, not to speak of the pollution and gases produced by all the extra cars. Not only is this very serious in relation to carbon gases, but according to the WHO, pollution is a seriously underappreciated cause of morbidity and mortality.This proposal is an example of seriously retrograde planning that flies in the face of global understandings of how to best manage traffic in urban areas and to make cities more liveable..