After almost seven long years plagued by delays and multibillion-dollar blowouts, the West Gate Tunnel Project is nearly complete.
The state government and Transurban say their new toll road will open by the end of the year, promising motorists faster trips from the western suburbs to the city and fewer trucks on local roads.
There is no evidence to suggest this will ever be the case. Time and time again we have been told to expect fewer trucks on our local roads only to find the numbers increase.
Vicroads have consistently increased the allowable size of trucks on Melbourne roads despite knowing the dangers to other road users. This at the same time rail projects designed to take trucks off roads have been deliberately delayed.
With almost nine kilometres of elevated carriageways and a spaghetti junction of overpasses on the CBD’s western edge, it might be difficult to imagine the project will ever rank alongside Flinders Street Station or the Arts Centre spire as one of the city’s architectural icons.
Sorry this was sold to taxpayers as a tunnel in fact it is not a tunnel is one part of a major project that has forever changed the vista of Melbourne and created a spaghetti of roads in the inner suburbs with all the associated pollution to be expected from an additional 50,000 vehciles a day.
But Major Road Projects Victoria acting chief executive Paul Roth says he hopes Melburnians will be impressed by the project’s many bold design choices that give subtle – and often not-so-subtle – nods to the city’s history and natural and built environment.
Will we? The amount it has cost could probably buy all the fine art in the National Gallery of Victoria. How could anyone be impressed with such a polluting vehicle sewer through the inner western suburbs without mind you any consideration of the toxic fumes from the tunnel bering spewed out for residents living close to the road.
“There is a responsibility when you’re building this large-scale infrastructure to make sure that it’s got an appropriate level of urban design to sit comfortably within the landscape,” he says. “You don’t want to go over the top. But nor do you want to build a highly utilitarian, plain concrete box that’s sitting in really stark contrast to the city that it’s meant to be a part of. ”
The Age visited the project to preview what motorists will see when they use the road.
Entering the fish nets
Motorists entering and exiting the twin four-kilometre tunnels beneath Yarraville will pass under huge wooden arches spanning each of the three portals.
The largest, at the northern entrance in Yarraville, is 38 metres high and wide and consists of 364 laminated timber beams.
Roth says the timber “nets” were inspired by Indigenous Victorians’ fishing nets, while the wooden beams also invoke the planks of a jetty in a nod to the inner-west’s maritime history.
Behind the nets, massive ventilation stacks are being clad with silver panels and loom on the horizon like a shark fin rising from the sea.
Roth says the nets, designed by local firm Wood Marsh, serve to help filter sunlight to ease the transition for drivers’ eyes as they emerge from the tunnel. “A lot of the elements are actually that combination of form and function.”
This article is surely designed to put “lipstick on a pig” attempting to find a positive story from what has been a disastrous project for Victoria that will leave a significant negative legacy on local residents and our city for future generations. We still wait for Port Rail Shuttles years overdue and destined never to arrive but instead have a project that will push up the cost of travel and our goods because the government is not investing enough in the movement of freight by rail into and out of the Port of Melbourne.
The toll road’s opening date has not been announced. But the state government insists motorists will be able to use the West Gate Tunnel before the end of the year. The toll price will start at a $4.09 a car.
The Age source with editorial
Delusional article when the road is so polluting and so out of touch with 2030 planning.