Fremantle Road to Rail

The road to rail campaign is born out of community concern surrounding the ensuing development of the residential road network as the primary mechanism to carry out the freight movement task.

Container freight moving through the port of Fremantle is expected to double from 600,000 containers annually to over 1.2 million in the next 10 to 15 years.

The State Government recently announced its intention to upgrade High Street to service the increase in truck movements. This upgrade will:

·be a six lane highway,
·be trenched into the ground with walls of up to three meters high
·have a curve going from High Street into Stirling Highway enabling trucks to travel at 70km/hr around it
·take out all of the old remnant Tuart trees
·bulldoze FERN and parts of the Royal Fremantle Golf Course
·completely dissect the community cutting off connectivity between Gibson Park and White Gum Valley as well as Gibson Park and East Fremantle.

The High Street widening is the first in many more road works to accommodate container freight. Once High Street is six lanes then there will be a push for Stirling Highway to be six lanes and the traffic bridge to be doubled, a flyover at Marmion Street and eventually the Roe 8 extension will go straight through the Beeliar Wetlands.

This is happening while there is a perfectly good freight rail network that is woefully under-utilised. The Governments own report states the existing network is capable of undertaking 30% of the freight task yet is currently only doing 14%.

This campaign is not opposing road works outright. We know the High Street intersection for example needs work what we are saying is that we want the Government to:

·fully utilise the existing capacity on the freight rail network
·develop a long term integrated transport plan that preferences rail transport over road transport

Rail transport is safer, cleaner and less expensive when all the external impacts (carcinogenic diesel particulate pollution, road trauma, noise pollution, road maintenance etc etc) of road freight transport are considered.

The funds will be used to create a campaign kit to spread the message of Road to Rail and get people informed and engaged in the issue.

We will be

1) Printing 100 T-Shirts at a cost of $1400

2) Printing 1000 Bumper Stickers at a cost of $800

3) Printing 18 signs at a cost of $16.50 each

These items will be used by the Road To Rail Campaign at the upcoming Fremantle Festival Parade on the 10th of November and other subsequent actions and events throughout the campaign.

For this campaign to succeed it needs an informed and active community lobbying the State Government for change.

Our challenge is to get this message simple and accessible and have many many people aligned in their vision for Fremantle and Perth in general with respect to how we want our infrastructure developed to transport freight.