The North East Link will worsen traffic congestion where the Eastern Freeway terminates at Punt Road.
Previously Infrastructure Australia listed East West Link as the second most important infrastructure project behind the Metro Rail Tunnel. In its latest report it has a high priority. See excerpt copied below. EWL solves Melbourne's worst congestion problem.
The North East Link project involves widening the Eastern Freeway to up to 18 lanes in the Doncaster/Balwyn/Bulleen section. So for you to say it takes traffic off the Eastern Freeway is just plain wrong. The 18 lanes are designed specifically to take more traffic.
NEL was first promoted by Andrews at $9.8 billion which has now ballooned out to $15.6 billion. It is not budgetted, has no business case and the sharing of project risks mean that only non conforming bids are expected. There is still a great chance that the NEL project will be stopped in its tracks when the bids are received. Building a long tunnel under the Yarra River and Banyule Drain flood zones is crazy. Not only is it an engineering nightmare there are lots of old buried rubbish tips in the path of the tunnel. Good luck dealing with aesbestos and dangerous chemicals dumped there over the last 100 years.
In my view the benefits of the East West Link project were understated. Everybody in Melbourne knows that unless the East West Link project is completed traffic congestion in central Melbourne will not be resolved.
Cheers.................Daicosisgod
Infrastructure Australia (page 102) Priority List published Feb 2021
The 2019 Australian Infrastructure Audit identified the east–west corridor to the north of Melbourne’s CBD as one of Melbourne’s major congestion challenges. Vehicles travelling east–west between the Eastern Freeway and CityLink are forced to navigate the congested inner-city road network, or the heavily utilised M1 corridor to the south of the city. This results in congestion and delays on Melbourne’s urban road network for both passenger and freight vehicles. The Audit found that this corridor had the highest road congestion delay cost in Melbourne in 2016, with a delay cost of $91 million. This is expected to worsen by 2031, with the delay cost projected to increase to $131 million (2016 prices). The Eastern Freeway only extends as far as Hoddle Street on the edge of the CBD, channelling the large volume of vehicles heading into and out of the city onto residential streets in the inner north.
