We the People of Mt Atkinson and Deanside from the City of Melton (the fastest growing municipality in Australia), deserve to have access to a decent public transportation. We are already a population of 10k+ people and our immediate vicinity account for about 50k+ people (Source: City of Melton). However, even being the size of a small city, we still deprive from any mode of public transportation available to us. Every morning we fight traffic on already clogged roads to drop our kids to school and to go to work using train stations in Caroline Springs or Rockbank; where after (on a lucky day) finding a car park, you then wait for a good 20mins between trains (if you missed one). This is the daily struggle of all the people who are only about 25km away from CBD, but still spend up to an hour just to get to a nearby train station (and it’s getting worse with more people moving into the area).

The currently proposed Mt Atkinson Train Station at the northern edge of Mt Atkinson (near Hopkins Rd) can resolve this nightmare and improve the accessibility for the residents, along with other planned local infrastructure improvements such as: Hopkins Rd Level Crossing removal & duplication, introducing PTV bus services to/from the nearby vicinity, Western Freeway upgrade etc. So even with a very high current and future demand for this train station, the state government still have not even begun the planning for it. 

In comparison, the recently announced and committed Tarneit West Station has a current population of about 15k in its immediate vicinity (source: City of Wyndham). While the local population of Mt Atkinson being of a similar size, still do not have a mention of its proposed train station in any of state government’s projects. It is also found that, by 2035 the Mt Atkinson area will be even bigger than Tarneit West, so choosing the Tarneit West location to have a train station over Mt Atkinson in the Western Growth Corridor is not justified.

In addition, Mt Atkinson precinct will also bound to host about 19K+ jobs in the future. Hence, a better planning and investment in public transport is severely needed in this area. Therefore, we would like to request the State Government and its relevant department to review this and immediately start the planning & delivery of the Mt Atkinson Train Station.