The money spent on a useless road could be better spent on useful new trains for Melbourne’s rail network, and better infrastucture on that network (South Morang extension, dual-line to Hurstbridge, etc.) to make the network much more appealing for people instead of using their cars to get to the city.

You and your wife can always, under the Currie proposal, go by bus and walk to the hospital from the bus stop.

The ignorance of, and hostility to, pricing as a means of sorting high from low value use – of anything – knows no bounds, whether it be congestion, carbon or coconuts.

Be careful – the objective is not to stop car travel – it is to eliminate wasteful congestion and to facilitate getting a parking spot at low cost.

If it’s not for a general audience, I don’t see why (1) getting rid of on street parking wouldn’t reduce congestion — surely that would (for everyone involved), and (2) I imagine that slow speeds in shopping centres is fairly neutral (a bit like schools zones; and (3) not building more roads is probably true if you consider the opportunity cost (e.g., building some more train tracks instead).
.
With a more complicated version of pricing it would be handy to know how many more cars could be on the streets before we would end up in the same situation. It would also be handy to know to what prices you would need to stop congestion — maybe people pretty inelastic to this and basically drive until congestion makes it take much longer.