Save Willy Road

williamstown road after the west gate tunnel opens

The Government has forecast that when the West Gate Tunnel opens in late 2025, truck numbers on Williamstown Road will double. Those traffic projections were contained in documents created for the West Gate Tunnel Project’s Environment Effects Statement (EES) by consultants GHD.

Why will they double? Two main reasons.

1. WEBB DOCK. It’s true that legislated 24/7 truck bans on the east-west routes of Somerville Road, Francis Street and Buckley Street will stop trucks travelling through the inner west to reaching Swanson Dock and Appleton Dock at the Port of Melbourne via Whitehall Street and Footscray Road. They will be forced to use the West Gate Tunnel instead. But trucks travelling north-south between the vast container parks in Tottenham/Brooklyn and Webb Dock, which they access via West Gate Bridge, will continue to use Williamstown Road, linking with Sunshine Road and Geelong Road. Many of those trucks are old and heavy polluting vehicles, emitting levels pollution as much as 60 times that of modern trucks meeting Euro 5 and 6 emissions standards.

Container trade through the Port of Melbourne continues to grow: in 2024 the port handled the equivalent of 3.4 million 20-foot containers, a 9 percent increase over the previous year — but by 2055 it will handle 7.1 million. Nine in 10 of those containers are carried by truck. The port forecasts that the number of trucks visiting the port each weekday could rise from 11,000 to 34,000 in just 25 years. And the bulk of the growth will be at Webb Dock. This article explains the issue well, and answers why we currently have so many container trucks on residential streets of the Inner West.

2. NEW TOLLS FOR TRUCKS. As part of the West Gate Tunnel project, the state government struck a deal with Transurban: more lanes would be added to the West Gate Freeway, but Transurban would add new tolling gantries between Millers Road and Williamstown Road just for trucks. Once the tunnel opens, truck operators will pay a toll to use the freeway, regardless of whether they use the new tunnel or not. Even with toll caps, many truck operators will pay more than $145 a day. How do they avoid them? Simple: exit the freeway and use Geelong Road and Williamstown Road instead. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of truck drivers will take the cheap route past homes rather than remain on the “freeway” and pay a punitive toll. In short, the tolls create a huge financial incentive for operators to exit the freeway and drive past homes instead. Lower traffic volumes at night will make this rat-run even more attractive.

The doubling of truck numbers will make both Williamstown Road and local Inner West streets unsafe for pedestrians, cyclists and car drivers. This will also negatively impact on the health of road users and residents of the surrounding area (see the supporting evidence). The City of Maribyrnong already has the highest rate of asthma-related child hospital admissions in Victoria. The diesel pollution fallout zone covers any home within 200 metres of Williamstown Road. The fallout zone includes a large number of homes, small businesses, sporting facilities and schools in Seddon, Kingsville and Yarraville.

From A (Container Park in Tottenham) to B (Port of Melbourne) via Sunshine Road and Williamstown Road.

Williamstown Road Cannot Cope with 5,000 Trucks Per Day

The Government’s and the West Gate Tunnel Project’s promise to remove trucks off local roads ignores their own projections for massive increases of truck traffic on Williamstown Road (Maribyrnong City Council) and Millers Road (Hobsons Bay City Council). Legislated truck bans will apply only on Somerville Road, Francis Street, Buckley Street and Moore Street as well as Blackshaws Road and Hudsons Road. The exemption of Williamstown Road from 24-hour truck bans in the City of Maribyrnong will undoubtedly funnel a huge increase in trucks rumbling past our homes.

Williamstown Road: the new Francis Street

VicRoads recognised that truck numbers on the infamously busy and polluted truck thoroughfare, Francis Street (Yarraville) were unacceptable. After years of community pressure led by the Maribyrnong Truck Action Group, they introduced truck bans to protect residents and school students. The official projections for truck numbers after the opening of the West Gate Tunnel confirm that Williamstown Road will become the new Francis Street, a 24/7 toxic truck route. Why doesn’t Williamstown Road deserve the same protection?

$10 Billion FAIL

How can billions be spent on infrastructure, only to move the truck problem around the corner? Shifting the problem to new residential streets with the West Gate Tunnel project only benefits Transurban, not the local community.

imagine sharing the road with 5,000 trucks - day and night

Without truck bans, almost 5,000 trucks a day will be thundering their way down Williamstown Road day and night, creating more noise and vibration for residents, making it more dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers and spewing out far greater amounts of toxic diesel exhaust into the air we breathe. The Government expects that as truck traffic increases on Williamstown Road, car traffic will decrease to avoid truck traffic jams. Where will frustrated car drivers go? They’ll soon be weaving through the back streets of Seddon, Kingsville and Yarraville, turning quiet residential streets into busy short cuts.

WE SUPPORT LOCAL INDUSTRY and welcome local truck deliveries

We acknowledge that some trucks are servicing our local community and these vehicles are always exempt from truck bans. Local businesses require access to their properties, however most trucks are darting down our roads towards non-local destinations. The constant ferrying of empty containers back and forth between the Port of Melbourne and storage yards in the West is not sustainable. 

In 2017, the Port of Melbourne Corporation was already moving 2.5 million containers per year, and made a submission to Infrastructure Victoria declaring a target of up to 15 million containers per year by 2068. How will they manage to move so many containers? By trucks going past your front door. The consortium driving growth of the Port is calling for the Government to lift the truck curfews on our local streets that our community has spent decades fighting to secure, and to encourage truck operators to target our streets at night.

MARIBYRNONG, WHERE OLD DIRTY TRUCKS GO TO DIE

A 2021 study by AustRoads showed that modern, efficient and less polluting trucks are allocated to long and profitable journeys. The task of shuttling containers to and from the Port — with many of those journeys through local residential streets of the Inner West — are relegated to older, unsafe, noisy and heavily polluting trucks. The Truck Industry Council has noted that almost 42 percent of the nation’s truck fleet was manufactured before 2003 when little, or no exhaust emission regulation existed — and more than 25 percent of all trucks were manufactured before 1996 when no emission standards existed at all. The TIC says: “These trucks are polluting at rates 60 times that of trucks complying with the current Australian regulation.” Or expressed differently: “It would take SIXTY of today’s trucks to emit the PM emissions of ONE pre-1996 truck.” (Emphasis theirs) Sickening? Yet they will make up the bulk of the 5000 trucks the Andrews Government will be diverting to Williamstown Road.