The current state government road budget makes the scale of the problem explicit. Victoria’s 2026-27 budget allocates $1.04 billion for roads \u2014 a figure council leaders say doesn’t come close to matching real need. Colac Otway Shire’s own chief executive estimated $40 million would be required just to bring that single shire’s roads up to standard, while a Green Triangle Freight Action Committee estimate put the repair bill for key state-managed freight routes in the state’s southwest at $400 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rail offers a lower-cost, lower-damage alternative that Victoria has consistently under-invested in. A single freight train can replace roughly 150 truck trips, and just 25 freight trains can move the equivalent of what would otherwise take 2,000 trucks to shift to port. Rail freight is also more than three times as fuel-efficient as road freight per tonne-kilometre \u2014 using around 0.30 megajoules per tonne-km compared to road’s 0.95 \u2014 and produces roughly one-third of the emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Screenshot-2026-09-14-at-3.38.22-pm-1024x485.png\")
That chart shows the core efficiency gap plainly \u2014 rail uses roughly a third of the fuel per tonne-kilometre that road freight does, which is the physical basis for the lower emissions, lower cost, and lower road-damage case in the article. Let me know if you’d like a second one covering the “one train = 150 trucks” capacity comparison too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite this efficiency gap, the share of containers moving to and from the Port of Melbourne by rail fell to a low of just 6.1% in 2020-21, even as truck volumes to the port rose sharply \u2014 a trend driven partly by an $85-per-container stevedore charge applied to rail containers, with no equivalent charge on trucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The infrastructure meant to fix this has itself become a case study in delay. Victoria’s Auditor-General found the state’s Port Rail Shuttle Network \u2014 intended to connect metropolitan freight hubs at Altona, Somerton and Dandenong South directly to the port by rail \u2014 has consistently missed its own milestones, with contract completion dates extended six times for the Altona terminal and fourteen times for Somerton, producing an average delay of 17.6 months against original service commencement targets. The audit concluded the government’s target of shifting 30% of Melbourne’s metropolitan container freight to rail by 2050 is now unlikely to be met. The interstate terminal picture is no better: the long-planned Western Interstate Freight Terminal at Truganina, once expected to be operational by 2030, was indefinitely paused in 2024 in favour of prioritising a competing federal terminal at Beveridge, leaving both projects without a firm completion date and Melbourne without the interstate rail capacity industry groups say it urgently needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Responsibility for this outcome sits squarely with Freight Victoria, the specialist freight division established within the Department of Transport (now DTP) in 2018 specifically to coordinate delivery of the Victorian Freight Plan, then titled\u00a0Delivering the Goods<\/em>. Freight Victoria’s founding mandate was explicit: shift more freight onto rail, develop new inland freight terminals, and grow Victoria’s economy while taking trucks off local roads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Victorian Auditor-General’s own review of the government’s freight rail programs found that, years into that mandate, the programs “have not yet fully realised the government’s intention to move more freight by rail” and had not increased rail’s share of container freight in regional areas at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A second, now-superseded freight plan has since been replaced by the\u00a0Victorian Freight Plan 2025-30<\/em>, effectively an admission that the original 2018 targets were not met on schedule. An agency created for the specific purpose of shifting freight from road to rail, overseeing a rail mode-share that instead fell to 6.1% of port containers and terminal projects delayed by well over a year on average, is not a policy success story quietly continuing in the background \u2014 it is the institutional face of the failure this article describes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The safety case compounds the economic one. Fewer trucks on regional roads means fewer heavy-vehicle interactions with cars and a smaller contribution to Australia’s roughly $18 billion annual road crash cost. Victoria’s continued reliance on road freight isn’t a neutral choice \u2014 it’s a policy default, administered by an agency explicitly tasked with reversing it, that is actively generating the road damage, the safety risk, and the repair bill the state is now scrambling to fund.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A single B-double truck causes, per kilometre travelled, roughly 20,000 times the road wear of an ordinary family car.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":363954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,47],"tags":[14388,8269,8],"class_list":["post-539471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-rail-news","tag-freight-victoria","tag-vicroads","tag-victoria"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t