Longtime Freo Campaigner Calls for a FOF Development Authority

Peter Newman rightly points to the prospect of a six to eight lane super highway smashing through Fremantle as the Elephant in the Room for the Future of Fremantle – or FOF – committee. I would add rail to that mix as it also splinters North Freo and divides Fremantle from its waterfront.

The hardest and most critical challenge for government is to acknowledge that ‘business as usual’ planning, allowing road and rail agencies to protect their transport corridors and stick to their bog-standard textbook designs, will blight the potential of our amazing city.

‘Business as Usual’ may have helped deliver freeways and passenger rail to Perth’s extremities and perhaps that pleases voters in suburbia. However, Fremantle is our second city, it’s at the confluence of our water focussed lifestyles, strategically centred in our sprawling elongated coastal metropolis, and it must be treasured as a major destination and not treated as a convenient thoroughfare to somewhere else.

Unlike more enlightened and sophisticated cities, in Perth the road and rail agencies are more like woolly mammoths, a protected species whose work pre-dates and precedes any modern concept of city building. As long as road corridors and rail reservations are laid out in advance and in complete isolation from other urban design needs, Perth’s more visionary strategic urban designers can’t possibly overcome the horrendous fragmentation these transport canyons cause.

Credit Les Moyle

We are doomed if Future of Fremantle and Cabinet don’t make the bold step to demarcate the redevelopment areas surrounding the port as special planning zones where neither Main Roads nor the Public Transport Authority get to maintain their business as usual approach. The most practical way to deliver an integrated urban strategy for a destination city wrapped around our harbour will be to hand over control to a single well resourced planning and development authority with strong legislative powers. Such an authority needs political will and financial commitment to implement the right configuration of road, rail and bridge infrastructure.

It is important to emphasise this in not a stance against roads per se. There is a need for efficient regional roads but they must be radically modified in a built up urban area. Of course, we also need a focus on alternative transport but the two are not mutually exclusive.

Governments in WA have made political mileage with platforms to stop the Eastern Bypass and Roe 8/9, but they haven’t exactly planned for or implemented the alternative solutions needed to overcome the great dividing river that splits Perth in two. Our current government has been very road focussed. Like all past governments it has somewhat pandered to those implementing the ‘great suburban dream’. In the absence of a clear and sustainable transport vision for a ridiculously lengthy coastal suburbia, having only two locations to cross the river with a 12 km gap in-between creates bottle necks at Freo and The Narrows. In that same length, Melbourne has twelve road bridges and numerous rail crossings including a new tunnel. Their is plenty of opportunity to spread the north-south transport load across the river, but that is a bigger conversation for another day.

In the Freo context, it is important not to become too fixated on the volume of regional traffic but rather to mandate that it can’t be accommodated by conglomerating it into super highways that destructively fragment urban environments. We must create urban roads with matching urban bridges. As we know from High St and the bridge proposals , building ‘main roads’ and super bridges that require controlled access and mega interchanges are not the solution.

Given the geographical context of the narrow Leighton peninsula and the existing city centre of Fremantle, including the Northern Gateway, that means all the roads, current and future need to integrate with and positively support the urban realm. Put simply, we need low speed tree-lined boulevards that are pedestrian/cycle friendly, no greater that four lanes, and with non-radial, square edged intersections. We may need two or three of these types of roads with corresponding bridges to match.

Allowing traffic to permeate smoothly but slowly through urban areas is similar to how a river changes from the fast moving cutting it created to get through the hills to a forever adapting multi-channel delta system where the river dissipates its energy, drops its load and merges with the ocean. As New Orleans knows, conglomerating all that water into a single artificial channel just gets more and more out of control until it risks destroying the city that the engineers imagined they were trying to protect.

In relation to the passenger rail, there is not a viable solution in North Fremantle where the rail remains at grade for any great length. The options and benefits of grade separation require exploration, including cuttings, tunnels and even raised sections of rail. Fixing the rail will be expensive but not in the context of the massive development benefits it can generate. It does demand an intensity of development to warrant the infrastructure spend. For the Freo community to embrace higher density, the infrastructure spend needs to deliver significant community benefit for existing and new occupiers of our city.

Future of Fremantle can promote all manner of inspiring design principles in developing their vision but unless the prehistoric woolly mammoths of Main Roads and the PTA are confronted from the get-go, their road and rail ‘solution’ will still hopelessly fragment and dis-integrate the urban realm we are trying to create.

* By Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan is well know around Fremantle as a former architect, community campaigner and for his 16 years as a Fremantle councillor spanning three decades, including recently as Acting Mayor.

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