The Benefits of Level Crossing Removal: lessons from Melbourne's historical experience

This research is part of our on-going investigations of public transport futures for Melbourne. Since 2005, we have worked with many colleagues and with our students at the University of Melbourne and at RMIT to incorporate understanding of the technical and operational requirements for effective public transport networks into contemporary architectural and urban design processes. Much of this work has been supported by a large cohort of industry partners in state and local government, and in the private sector. Its directions have been set though research made possible through Australian Research Council grants. In 2012, we turned our attention to the experience of passengers in and around stations. We wanted to know how station design could best contribute to greater public transport use by encouraging pedestrians and cyclists, improving bus-train interchanges, and creating space for socially useful urban development. Through the Transit for All project, funded by the University of Melbourne's Carlton Connect Initiative and our industry partners, student designs for new stations across the Melbourne suburban rail network were used to stimulate critical debate among the public and private sector networks of professionals responsible for much of Melbourne's recent work on new stations and level-crossing removals. We began that project with an agnostic position on the relative merits of rail-under or rail-over options for level-crossing removals. However, after reviewing the work produced over three iterations of our design-research process, it became clear that elevated rail had some distinct advantages over the typical 'trenched-rail' designs being constructed around Melbourne. We are grateful to the Level Crossing Removal Authority for their support, which allowed us to continue this independent research in 2015.