Tuesday, 4 March 2025

Adjournment

North East Link

Matthew GUY (Bulleen) (19:00): (1031) My adjournment matter tonight is for the Minister for Transport Infrastructure, and it concerns car parking at the North East Link. Recently the North East Link Authority closed car parking for its workers at the corner of Bulleen Road and Manningham Road. There were hundreds of spaces there, but they have not replaced it with anything, so what that means is of course the obvious: that all those people parking cars have now transferred to residential streets. Avon Street, St Andrews Crescent, Golden Way and Rocklea Road, just to start with, are now absolutely jam-packed with workers at the North East Link parking their vehicles at the Bulleen end of that project. What we have is a generally older population trying to get in and out of their driveways, which they cannot because there are cars parked abutting them, and narrow suburban streets where there are cars on both sides and you cannot turn in and out, particularly on St Andrews Crescent. I have been there a number of times with residents and seen this firsthand. It makes it very, very difficult for those people to be mobile in any way – to get to the shops, to move around and to generally live their lives fairly.

There is another option, of course, and it is one which I am asking the minister to intervene in and ensure occurs, and that is the option of the brand new soccer fields, which, lo and behold, were paid for as part of the works for the North East Link, at the newly opened Powerful Owl Park on Templestowe Road, where there are 300 car parks that sit empty during the day. Those parks could be requisitioned for North East Link workers during the day and shuttle buses run from there – literally, it is less than a kilometre from there down to the main works – so that workers can go to and from without much fuss. Should more car parks be needed, a kilometre or so up Templestowe Road, if the minister has conversations with the City of Manningham, they would be able to requisition Finns Reserve, which could be used for another 200 car parks. That is a significant number: hundreds of car parks which could be used to replace a closed car park on the corner of Manningham Road in Bulleen so small residential streets need not fill up with that burden. So my adjournment tonight is to ask the Minister for Transport Infrastructure to intervene and ensure that the North East Link Authority not use car parks on suburban streets but require its workers to park in one or both of those two locations and run shuttle buses between them so that residents regain their streets for themselves.