Transport campaign

By Tania Martin
THE Eastern Transport Coalition (ETC) has ramped up its campaign for better outer-eastern transport services by launching a campaign to get the State Government to sit up and take notice.
The seven mayors from the municipalities of Yarra Ranges, Knox, Monash, Whitehorse, Dandenong, Manningham and Maroondah launched a monster petition at Monash University’s Clayton campus at 11am.
ETC chairwoman and Yarra Ranges councillor Samantha Dunn said the petition would highlight that the Victorian Transport Plan did absolutely nothing for the outer-east.
Cr Dunn said she hoped the petition would be like that of the suffragettes in 1891 who collected more than 25,000 signatures in support of women’s right to vote.
She said the ETC petition was made of multiple rolls of recyclable synthetic paper, each 15 metres long with two signature columns.
Monash student association president Julian Campbell said people travelling to the university and the adjacent science and innovation precinct were missing out under the Brumby Government’s Victorian Transport Plan.
“The ETC’s petition has our full support,” he said. “We hope that it will finally get the message through to the Brumby Government that public transport is a serious issue in the east, not only for Monash students but for everyone who lives and works in this region.”
Cr Dunn said Monash University was the perfect place to launch the petition as it was a “desert” when it came to public transport.
“It’s nowhere near rail and it has this massive car park to support it … it’s a good example of really bad planning for access to transport,” he said.
The petition will travel around the region for the rest of this year, hosted for three weeks by each of the ETC’s member councils before being presented to Victorian Parliament.
Cr Dunn said the coalition was bitterly disappointed that the transport plan had not included any major initiatives to tackle the significant gaps in the provision of planning for public transport in the region.
“We need to get as many signatures as possible as an excellent tool to highlight to government what they have determined for this region does not include us to any great degree,” she said.
“We’re putting the government on notice that it’s time to end the neglect.”