MELBOURNE will become the world’s container storage park and surrounding municipalities will be bear the increased truck traffic if the $1.6billion Webb Dock expansion proceeds, a Williamstown community meeting heard last week.
Speaking at the meeting on Thursday, Williamstown resident of 55 years Bill Pride urged the community to come up with a strategy to “stop the thing growing out of proportion”.
“Why should we be a storage area for the rest of the world for containers?
“Surely we can turn around as a community and say to Port of Melbourne, look, you’re not going to store containers there. Store them somewhere else or make the ships take them
away.”
Mr Pride said the increase in trucks was also concerning, with truck movement in some areas set to double.
“Surely the council or the community can do something about the blasted trucks coming down Francis Street in Yarraville.
“Is that right that 6000 trucks go down there a day. Are we going to increase that again?
“There’s got to be restrictions placed somewhere on trucks. There’s got to be restrictions placed on containers.”
Maribyrnong councillor Martin Zakharov said the truck glut was a major concern.
“We already handle in Yarraville 10,000 trucks a day in Somerville Road and Francis Street, and that’s only between six in the morning and eight in the evening, so it’s fairly intense.
“I can assure you, I live on Somerville Road and I hear the containers on the dock every night. As soon as the traffic dies down I can hear those containers landing, so we already have those issues in Maribyrnong.”
– Goya Dmytryshchak
