This is an opinion piece by Melbourne Lord Mayor Doyle.
He is the first person to reveal that the preferred option is via Albion:
but perhaps he has been misinformed?
The airport has never been called Tullarine.
It was opened pretentiously as 'Melbourne International Airport', then
morphed quietly to 'Melbourne Airport'.

Roderick B Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor

In March, we get a rare
opportunity. Tullamarine
Airport Master Plan is made
public in draft form, with the
opportunity to describe what
we want our major airport to be.
It's not a chance that comes along
very often. It may be our only crack
at fixing Tullamarine in our lifetimes.
When Tullamarine opened in 1970.
it was a visionary and world-class '
facility. It was sited in a green wedge
away from urban development but
still close to the city, with plenty of
capacity and room for growth in a
modern single-terminal model.
There was no curfew. good road
access and plenty of parking, and
plans for a high-speed raillink.
- There's of development
and investment going on at
Tullamarine right now: new internal
and external road links, a new
terminal for the low-cost airlines, a
new east-west runway plan. In fact,
$1 billion over the next 5 years
and $10 billion over the next 20.
But there are still issues which are
not on the agenda, or easy to fix, but
are not being addressed. Some
glaring shortcomings remain.
Firstly, a rail link to the airport.
Everybody -government, airport
management, travelling public,
tourists - supports it. And we've
been talking about it since 1958.
We've narrowed the possibilities
for its route from three down to one:
the Albion - Jacana alternative.
But are we building it? No. It
seems further off than ever, with
major infrastructure projects like
Metro One, the East-West Tunnel
and Westlink all higher priorities but
without a dollar devoted to them.
Let's commit to a rail link, agree
the best scenario, and get on with building it.
Secondly, the major public transport link, Skybus, suffers
because the Tullamarine freewav no longer copes with the airport traffic,
and Skybus doesn't have a dedicated lane to use.
Department of Transport has
been working on a dedicated bus
lane on the Tullamarine freeway for
over a decade yet it seems to have
fallen off the agenda completely, as
has the widening of the freeway.
The traffic jams start at the
Mickleham Rd exit, not even at the
airport exit itself. Why do we put up
with this?
An upgraded road with rail is
complementary, not mutually exclusive.
Inside the airport we also have
traffic management problems.
The single terminal model that
was so advanced for the 1970s simply
does not allow efficient internal
movement of vehicles on the upper
or the lower concourses.
Access and interior roads are parts
of the Master Plan we must get right:
if you can't get to the airport, into it, around and then out efficiently,
then
it's not meeting the needs of a modern transport hub.
Thirdly, there is opposition to the
curfew-free status of the airport.
This is a common problem of
urbanisation. Newcomers make
strong arguments for quality of life,
but the reality is that preexisting
use has to the priority.
We've got problems of urban
planning rather than aircraft traffic.
A curfew-free airport is the major
competitive advantage and must remain.
Fourthly, Tullamarine's management has been critical of the
government's decision to fund a rail
link to Avalon airport and the
decision to have Avalon share
Tullamarine's major fuel pipeline.
Tullamarine argues it handles
29 million passengers each year and
is the major air hub for Melbourne
and therefore scarce government
funding should be directed its way.
Avalon argues that a city of our
size, so close to our second-largest
city, Geelong, can be well served by a
second international airport and
that Avalon's capacity should be
built as quickly as possible.
Both points of view are correct.
The reality is that they must be
developed in tandem.
Fifthly, the service that we get at
Tullamarine desperately needs
improvement. The baggage
carousels are a ioke. Standing at
those 1970s carousels after a busy
flight, it is survival of the fittest. Why
can't there be people organising
luggage out of the chutes, as
happens at airports worldwide?
There are also airports that allow
you to check your baggage at the point of departure for the airport: as
you catch the bus or train. This
doesn't appear to be on the agenda
for Melbourne.
But if domestic services are bad,
international service is worse. It's a
federal responsibility to provide
Customs, but here we have underutilised
infrastructure. Only half the
booths seem to be open at any time,
and surely a wait of over an hour is a
terrible first impression for visitors.
And then there is the taxi service.
It's a lottery as to the quality you get.
And finally: Tulla just feels a bit
run down. Some of the older gate
lounges are more like industial caves. The building feels like it is
always undergoing renovation, but never completed.
There is no doubt the airport is
well run, and copes regardless of the
pressing need for the improvements.
But the chance to reimagine one
of our major assets and our city's
gateway doesn't come along very
often. Let's take the opportunity.