Hi Sypaladin, thanks for your very generous feedback that added to the point I'd made!
In Victoria our engineers are forced to jump when our pollies bark at them. Forty-five years ago I used to work for what is now VicRoads. I still count one of its past managers [himself an engineer'] as a close personal friend. His wife tells me that when they travel overseas he has to photograph bridges and that the real reason fast rail could never be built through East Gippsland was burrowing by wombats.
He refused to accept a promotion offered by government because he lost confidence in the manner in which politically inspired cost-cutting compromised projects, even later adding to project costs as a consequence.
For example, when Melbourne's SE Freeway was first constructed pollies restricted it to just two lanes, almost immediately after completing it they had to add more. So too with the Metropolitan Ring Road and at immense extra cost and huge disruption.
Indeed, one of my projects in Geography at Monash University in the early 1970s was to redesign Melbourne's transport network. Connecting existing rail lines and extending some from current hubs allowed the creation of 'ring rail' while road systems needed an inner and outer ring that would have been as cheap as chips to build back then.
Cities like Melbourne become people magnets. Unless our pollies get the planning and execution of its transport infrastructure right the city will become hideously congested and an economic basket-case.
