Meredith Brain was at the wheel of her car, banked up in traffic, feeling her decision move to a smaller town was the right one.
Back in her former home city of 22 years to run an errand, it felt unrecognisable.
"I just couldn't believe it – sitting in the queue for 15 minutes to get through the roundabout to go to the tip," she says.
"And this is 1 o'clock in the afternoon, not school time."
The sprawling city Meredith left behind wasn't Melbourne but Ballarat – one of the fastest growing areas in regional Victoria.
"What were paddocks and forest are now house rooftops," she says.
Are sprawling suburbs sustainable?
When Meredith moved to Ballarat in the mid-1990s, she enjoyed the vibe of a "slow, quiet country town".
Since then, the population has shot past the 100,000 mark and the Ballarat City Council projects it will reach 185,000 by 2040.
This week, the council resolved to ask the state's planning minister to begin the process of rezoning three more agricultural and industrial areas to Ballarat's north and west, so they can become future suburbs.
Council chief executive Evan King describes the decision as "probably the most important thing this council will do in its term".
But there's a sense of unease about adding to the urban sprawl.
"What I hear from the community is that sustainability is front of mind and has become increasingly so," councillor Belinda Coates says.
"Having liveable suburbs and areas that are sustainable and good for people's health and wellbeing are really important as well."
Time for a 'mindset shift'
Cities like Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong will grow whether they like it or not.
They're not far from Melbourne's outer west where, planning expert Andrew Butt says, the "problems of access, work and distance" are such that "people are looking at different options".
The associate professor, from RMIT University's Centre for Urban Research, thinks it's time for "a mindset shift in how Australians think about what their cities should look like and how they should function".
"There is a lot of evidence from research being done in outer Melbourne [showing] people make choices like owning second cars and, by the time the public transport gets there, they have quite entrenched travel habits," he says.
Cities like Ballarat do have space in their central areas for large-scale residential developments.
But pressure from residents to maintain the character of heritage neighbourhoods can make these projects difficult.
The City of Ballarat has fallen well short of its "aspirational" target of meeting half its demand for new housing from this type of "infill" development.
Tim Valpied, who has worked as a real estate agent there since 1994, says "the sheer amount of time to get projects through planning" has deterred developers from pursuing infill projects.
He believes rising property values are helping change that.
"Not everyone wants to go out into a greenfield subdivision – there has got to be a balance," he says.
Associate Professor Butt says Ballarat and other regional centres can't "assume there are boundless plains to keep developing on".
"It's only cheaper because there are costs worn by people who live there in terms of travel and there are costs worn by the rest of us in terms of service provision," he says.
"In the long-run, the sprawling car-based city might be more problematic to people's experience of the city in comparison to well-designed infill proposals.
Connecting suburbs spread wide
Another frustration for decision makers is uncertainty about what new services will be provided to the suburbs of the future.
Ballarat mayor Daniel Moloney says the council has asked the state government to plan more train stations for the city.
"The disappointing thing, unfortunately, is while we're required to have 15 years of land supply, it doesn't mean the government is going to fund 15 years of infrastructure to go with it," he says.
"This is talking about 30,000 lots, it's huge; conceivably that's 100,000 people."
Mr Moloney says the council has also been "banging our head against a wall for four or five years" asking the government for a city-wide review of the bus network.
The Victorian transport department did review bus services last year, but the council argues it didn't do enough to better connect people between different parts of Ballarat.
"[The existing network] just … assumes that someone is going to go from Wendouree to Melbourne, and that's not really how we travel," he said.
"People here are going from their house, usually to a place of study, a place of work or a place of shopping.
The Victorian Government has offered to help the council develop compulsory precinct structure plans to identify the services and infrastructure each new growth area needs.
A long -term planning framework for the city was completed in 2020, with input from the Victorian Planning Authority.
Mr Valpied says access to services is starting to become a greater consideration for property buyers in Ballarat.
"People are looking at infrastructure not only in terms of traffic flow, but even [having] good mobile coverage," he says.
