Martin Wurf has spent years watching trucks squeeze down his local streets. A resident of Melbourne’s inner west suburbs, he reckons his community is “choking to death” from the massive rigs carrying shipping containers to and from Australia’s biggest port.

Those docks, not far down the road from Mr Wurf’s Maribynong house, currently process two million containers a year. That is set to quadruple to 8 million by 2035.

Residents have long laid the blame for the issue at the feet of the state’s trucking industry.

The Victorian Transport Association has some sympathy for their plight. 

“We understand that it’s a lot of truck activity for local residents who are experiencing 10,000 vehicles a day driving down their streets,” says its chief executive Peter Anderson. 

“They are experiencing that every day, day after day. Night and day. It’s breaking down the value of their community. And we as an industry need to acknowledge that.” 

But the industry is the first to concede that despite this, there will be more trucks — and they’ll be bigger, longer and heavier. 

To address congestion, the trucking lobby is instead proposing more clearways for heavy vehicles and diverting trucks onto other roads at night. 

But it is also unashamedly advocating for more, and bigger, roads. 

“We’re building West Gate Tunnel and the North East Link plus the M80 is being widened,” Mr Anderson said. 

“And there are other plans afoot to make bigger roads and bigger connections between road and rail. 

“That’s the thinking that we encourage and that’s what we think will drive the industry and the community into a better standard of living going forward.” 

But Mr Anderson said in the long term there needed to be more ambitious solutions like decentralising the Port of Melbourne or building a special rail tunnel to shuttle containers between docks. 

“Doesn’t mean we get all the container trucks off the local roads, but we could probably remove 80 per cent or 90 per cent of them.”