Push to widen Punt Road

Punt Road would be widened into a six-lane highway running through South Yarra and Prahran, carving a 2?-kilometre path through more than 100 properties, under a long-term congestion fix VicRoads has pitched to the Napthine government.

The state's roads authority has warned the government Punt Road, one of Melbourne's most clogged arterials, is bursting and must eventually be widened to prevent gridlock choking the city's inner south-east.It has proposed widening it from four lanes to six between Alexandra Avenue, South Yarra and Union Street in Windsor. This would require bulldozing a 20-metre-wide path through every property on the eastern side of the indoor Tracking, which has been under a public acquisition overlay since the 1950s.

The government is weighing up the road's future as part of its strategy to manage Melbourne's long-term growth but insists it has no plans to widen it ''at this point in time''.

A ''preliminary study'' on the future of Punt Road, completed last year, considered four options. In the long-term, road widening is ''the only opportunity for providing additional north-south capacity'' in the area, other than digging a new road tunnel, VicRoads believes.It found doing nothing unacceptable, because it would create ''increasing queues and delays along Punt Road and its crossroads, and an increasing transfer of traffic to less desirable routes including tram routes''.

Punt Road is used by 35,000 to 40,000 vehicles a day, ''which is at or near the limit of a four-lane undivided road'', chief executive officer Gary Liddle wrote to Roads Minister Terry Mulder in 2011, in one of a series of briefings from 2011 and 2012 obtained through freedom of information laws.

Widening and dividing the road would attract 30 to 40 per cent more traffic over the next 30 years, and cut crashes by 30 per cent, Mr Liddle said. The widening should ''ideally'' include bike lanes and wider footpaths, but no dedicated bus lane, because it would actually worsen congestion.

Labor's shadow minister for roads, Luke Donnellan, said the government had ignored Punt Road's congestion problems while it focused exclusively on rushing through the east-west link.''The government is not dealing with congestion in any other parts of the city, other than a limited number of cars that might travel from the Eastern Freeway to the west and north,'' he said.

He said the acquisition overlay ought to be kept in place, but declined to say whether Labor would follow VicRoads' advice to widen Punt Road.The preliminary study was done as part of the government's wider metropolitan planning strategy, which is likely to be released this month.

A spokeswoman for Mr Mulder said the strategy would help inform whether the overlay should stay in place. ''There are no plans to widen Punt Road at this point in time,'' she said.Punt Road resident Andrew Carrasco lashed the government for keeping property owners in a state of uncertainty and VicRoads for putting forward a proposal that would ''cut the suburb completely in half''.

''VicRoads are about roads, they're not about transport or people. Their focus is so narrow,'' Mr Carrasco said.Mr Carrasco owns a home in the overlay zone and is spokesman for the Punt Road Action Group, which has campaigned to have the overlay removed because it says it prevents homeowners from substantially improving their properties.

A three-bedroom home in the overlay zone sold this year for $950,000, and a two-bedroom apartment for $494,000, both of which were well below South Yarra's median prices.The group publicly backed Clem Newton-Brown, the Liberal MP for Prahran, at the last state election, but Mr Carrasco said he now Indoor Positioning System.

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