The significantly flawed Westgate Tunnel Project a blight on Melbourne

The photo below looks like the “before” photo in an urban planning textbook section on failed urban blight projects, but it’s actually a project that’s only just being finished off now in Melbourne.

Billions of dollars and millions of hours of labour to make the city worse.

The Westgate Tunnel Project is one of the worst if not the worst projects Melbourne could ever have hoped to have built. The project is a sad blight on our fine city with kilometres of roads clogged with trucks sitting on our wonderful skyline. The project is designed to double the amount of traffic entering the inner city area by adding approximately 45,000 additional vehicles per day.

Instead of examining the options for more rail into the port of Melbourne the government with Transurban decided to ignore any other alternative investment strategies and double down on the number of trucks going to and from the Port of Melbourne. This is unsustainable and the government knows this.

About the Westgate Tunnel Project

The West Gate Tunnel, formerly known as the Western Distributor, is a four kilometre toll road currently under construction in Melbourne, Australia, to link the West Gate Freeway at Yarraville with the Port of Melbourne and CityLink at Docklands via twin tunnels beneath Yarraville, as well as a bridge and elevated road section.

The $10 billion project was proposed by infrastructure company Transurban in 2014 as a means of alleviating congestion on the M1 corridor, providing a new river crossing as an alternative to the West Gate Bridge and moving trucks out of residential streets in the city’s inner west. The freeway-standard link includes two tunnels with three lanes each that are approximately 4 km long outbound and 2.8 km long inbound, a new bridge over the Maribyrnong River, and an elevated road above Footscray Road. The project will also widen the West Gate Freeway from eight to 12 lanes between the M80 Ring Road and the West Gate Bridge.

The tunnel project replaced an earlier $680 million freight route, the West Gate Distributor, which the Australian Labor Party had taken to the 2014 state election as an alternative to the abandoned East West Link tollway. The construction cost was initially announced as $5.5 billion.

The project has been criticised by transport and urban planning experts, for overstating the benefits, increasing traffic in the inner city, and not considering better alternatives. They have also criticised the lack of transparency in the planning process, and the lack of independent and democratic review. In December 2017 the Coalition and the Greens vowed to block the project.

In evidence to a 2017 senate committee hearing on the operations of toll roads, transport planner William McDougall gave evidence that in 2015 he was contracted by the Victorian government to support an externally-appointed peer reviewer for the tunnel project’s transport modelling and to undertake a peer review of its cost-benefit analysis. He became convinced both the transport modelling and cost-benefit analysis were flawed and would not stand up to scrutiny. After raising concerns with state Treasurer Tim Pallas he was taken off the project’s work. His submission to the senate committee claimed the transport modelling had been “fudged” and the cost-benefit analysis overstated the project’s benefits. He wrote that the work for the project was “biased towards producing bullish forecasts and optimistic and financial projections … my direct experience as a reviewer confirmed my long-held suspicions of substantial ‘optimism bias’ in the appraisal process”.

Summary

In building this road fiasco the government handed over acres of valuable land in the area of the rail yards which service the Port of Melbourne reducing the amount of space available to move trains in and out of the Port and therefore reducing rail’s performance at the Port of Melbourne yet again.

This project will lead to more and more trucks on our highways across the state where rail is the answer to the port as it is in every other major city. Freight policy already broken in Victoria will be redesigned to the benefit of Transurban and their revenues.

If senior and specialist people have advised this is a dog of a project and will set Melbourne back a generation in reducing carbon emissions then why was it signed off?

So why have Victorian’s decided not to protest as this shocking project invented by Transurban and paid for by you. What benefits does Melbourne get? None really the benefits are all in favour of Tranbsurban who will now charge you to use a road that no one wanted except them and you have already contributed $billions as a Victorian. This is another great example of State Capture alive and well in Victoria where big business puts their business plans to a government who sign off for undisclosed benefits and the taxpayer is robbed.

Nice work Daniel Andrews and Tim Pallas.

I suspect it also means projects listed in this article by another contributor will be delayed as they have been to ensure more and more trucks create more and more toll revenue for Transurban. There is simply no other reason why rail projects as stated in the article are being delayed.

Victoria has again reset the boundaries of corruption.