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If you drive in Melbourne, chances are you may be familiar with the headache caused by travelling along Plenty Road in the city's northern suburbs.
The 30km stretch of road that connects inner-city suburbs like Preston to outer areas such as Whittlesea has been plagued with traffic congestion for years and, more recently, has been crowned Australia's most dangerous road once again.
According to AAMI Insurance’s 2024 Crash Index – which analysed data from more than 4.3 million motor claims nationally from 2014 to 2023 – Plenty Road in Bundoora was identified as the number-one spot for car collisions in the country for the past decade.
Leah James, AAMI’s Motor Claims Manager, said the worst roads identified in the report in each state or territory had similar problems that contributed to the high frequency of car accidents.
“The number-one crash hotspots in each state and territory are all notorious for road accidents and share similar attributes of being busy major roads, or main thoroughfares through industrial, educational, shopping centre precincts or central business districts,” James said in a media statement.
A Department of Transport and Planning Victoria spokesperson told Drive the safety of “all road users is our number-one priority – and we're continuing to work with the local community to identify ways that we can improve safety for everyone along Plenty Road”.
Beyond the data, various residents shared their experiences of witnessing frequent car accidents along the 30km-long arterial in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
“I have lived off Plenty Road for just over a year, walk down the road to get the tram for work twice a week [and I] have been the contact witness for maybe five accidents,” one Reddit user posted on the social media platform.
Why is Plenty Road so dangerous?
According to multiple experts, the combination of residential expansion, lack of alternative transport options, under-developed destination areas and confusing urban planning choices has contributed to the large rate of car accidents along Plenty Road.
“Plenty Road is carrying an enormous volume of traffic, and this has been growing over the last 20 years, as our northern suburbs have been developing outwards and we're putting more and more people into those areas,” Liam Davies, Lecturer on Sustainability and Urban Planning at RMIT University, told Drive.
“What we're currently grappling with, especially in Melbourne and Sydney, is urban areas that have gotten so vast there's not really that much room or desire to keep expanding out.
“As the city gets larger, what you get from this highway network is increased travel demand [from] people travelling larger and greater distances.
“We're now grappling with the problem that we are going to continue to grow in population, but we recognise that growing outwards is going to become more expensive to maintain all the infrastructure needs that we have. We're going to require more roads,” he told Drive.
Naturally, the increased presence of more drivers with a range of different driving behaviours along an important throughway such as Plenty Road could result in more crashes.
Kiran Shinde, an Urban Planning Professor at La Trobe University in Bundoora, said the mix of different vehicle classes using it is also a common problem.
“Plenty Road is a major arterial road and is flanked by many kinds of land uses – all generating different kinds of modes of transport. This is a common problem as these modes intersect with different land uses at different times.
“For example, the movement of trucks is restricted during the day, but then the challenge is having universities [and] schools feeding traffic on the same road,” Professor Shinde told Drive.
Additionally, the influx of younger, more inexperienced drivers, like university students, does factor into the higher likelihood of car collisions occurring.
“University students are only one of the user groups [prominently found along Plenty Road]. However, this group is highly diverse in its composition – international students who may not be fully aware of driving rules and conventions [as well as] the very young high schoolers new to roads and [who are] enthusiastic."
Various urban planning authorities said the road infrastructure problem along the outskirt suburbs running through Plenty Road is further compounded by the under-developed public transport system that forces residents to use cars as their only mode of travel.
At present, the 86 tram is the only tram line that runs along Plenty Road, while the state government has previously extended the train line to include stations in outer suburbs such as Doreen, Hawkstowe and Mernda.
“It was over 30 years ago the tram lines extended to University Hill, but think of how much the city's grown in that time when Mill Park [a neighbouring suburb of Bundoora] was almost on the edge of Melbourne.
“What we've done is we've put a vast amount of population out there [that] are serviced by the Mernda railway line. That's good but that only serves some trips.
“The tram runs short and then the rest of it is buses. Think about the crosstown connections... getting from that northern corridor, even just to the west. You're just going to drive down Plenty Road and then on the Ring Road.
“What we've done is built this entire [residential] development in the northern corridor [that's] almost devoid of transport offsets,” RMIT Lecturer Liam Davies told Drive.
Despite dedicated bus routes spotted along Plenty Road, the system has not been updated to accommodate an influx of people migrating to different outer suburbs along the major road network.
“We've failed to adequately provide quality public transport in these growth areas. We've built them as a car area and we've failed to put quality bus networks around them,” he explained.
It's worth noting that bus availability isn't a problem only found along Plenty Road, but across other outer Melbourne suburbs like Melton in the city's West, Cranbourne in the south-east, and Craigieburn in the north.
“The implicit approach by government is to say, 'let's get the housing built, let's get people into their houses that they can afford and then we'll sort out the buses later as these areas mature',” Marcus Spiller from SGS Economics and Planning, previously told the ABC.
“Bus services are not good in those new suburbs because it's very expensive to run a high-quality bus service when your ridership is very low because most people are getting around in private cars.
“The way that we've built a lot of suburbs in the greenfield areas of Melbourne ... is kind of with an unstated acceptance that they will be car-based and that has led to a lot of problems,” he added.
Why is Plenty Road so congested?
While the increased population in Melbourne's outer northern suburbs has contributed to more driver presence on the road, some experts said Plenty Road's urban layout also plays a part in the heavy traffic congestion.
Dr Elizabeth Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning at Melbourne University, said “Plenty Road probably meets the definition of a ‘stroad’ – it’s trying to be both a road (an arterial road with a lot of through traffic) and a street (with a lot of destinations and places to stop). It’s the worst of both”.
“[On] Plenty Road, there’s enough lanes and less land use mix that it starts to feel like they [drivers] should be going faster – and maybe they really need to be because the northern suburbs are very car reliant [and] Plenty Road is an important throughway.
“Some road space allocations [like multiple wider lanes] reflect this. But realistically, it’s still not quite a ‘road’ in the highway sense – there are cross streets, destinations and places to stop. It’s still a bit in-between, which is what makes for the greatest danger, particularly for vulnerable road users,” Dr Taylor told Drive.
According to Davies, stroads are an urban planning problem as their function tries to accommodate “for a maximum amount of people and goods [as well as] trying to be a place that people stop and go to”.
“When you get more traffic volumes, you'll get more crashes, but they're more likely to be less severe because congestion slows everything down – but it also creates more opportunities for collisions,” Davies told Drive.
The RMIT Urban Planning lecturer said since Plenty Road in Bundoora lacks destination areas that entice people to visit, it “really weakens the sense of place, and it means that it becomes less of a place that people want to go to, and it focuses and prioritises it as a movement corridor”.
Professor Graham Currie, the Director of Monash University's Public Transport, previously pointed to the high costs associated with traffic congestion in Melbourne.
“Traffic congestion costs the Melbourne economy over $5 billion per annum ($1000 a year for each resident), and a lot of that is extra travel time and fuel costs impacting residents' pockets,” Professor Currie told Drive.
“Without public transport, urban peak traffic congestion delays would increase [by] 47 per cent and travel time would increase by 42 per cent,” he added.
While there's no quick and easy fix to Plenty Road's congestion and high rate of car accidents, experts have highlighted some solutions.
In 2018, the Victorian State Government invested $178.6 million to upgrade specific sections of the major road network, which included newly built lanes, altered speed limits, increased road signage, upgrades to various intersections and traffic lights, and dedicated cycle lanes.
Beyond the planned roadworks, Davies said road authorities could consider a range of traffic-calming measures such as developing more shops to increase activity and road visibility while decreasing the speed limit.
“If you've got stuff on the sides [of Plenty Road] that's got people moving, things are happening, people are going to be more cautious and they'll slow back down again,” he told Drive.
“We could encourage more activity, especially around activity centres. This could mean building shops on the street... so it means that people slow down, they might look at a shop for a little bit, but it also means there'll be people on the street which gives more visual cues to calm down,” he added.
“Detailed spot-by-spot investigations are necessary... some sections may require better entry and exit lanes into residential neighbourhoods, some sections may require better thoroughfare for heavy traffic... there's no blanket solution [for Plenty Road],” Professor Shinde added.
Fundamentally, Plenty Road will continue to be a problem for motorists in the years ahead if the public transport system does not catch up to the growing population, Davies explained.
“We need to put investment into buses, particularly in our outer suburbs so that people have legitimate transport choices. We need to run buses better and that means running them more frequently, running good and direct routes, and giving them dedicated road space so they don't get stuck in traffic,” he told Drive.
“If you put in a bus lane and you put good [running] buses on it, you decrease the amount of congestion on the remaining lanes because you've taken more people [and] cars off the road than that lane space,” he said.
Ethan Cardinal graduated with a Journalism degree in 2020 from La Trobe University and has been working in the fashion industry as a freelance writer prior to joining Drive in 2023. Ethan greatly enjoys investigating and reporting on the cross sections between automotive, lifestyle and culture. Ethan relishes the opportunity to explore how deep cars are intertwined within different industries and how they could affect both casual readers and car enthusiasts.
