Article: Tunnel is right, says transport tsar

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From the Melbourne Age click here!

Tunnel is right, says transport tsar

Tunnel is right, says transport tsar
August 20, 2012 Adam Carey

VICTORIA'S most senior transport bureaucrat has championed the proposed east-west tunnel, arguing the multibillion-dollar road project would change the face of Melbourne and potentially pump billions into the state's economy.

Jim Betts, secretary of the Department of Transport, told an audience at the Ogden Transport Lecture last week that the planned underground tollway linking the Eastern Freeway with CityLink and the Western Ring Road would reduce congestion on Melbourne's roads and reinvigorate the city's inner north.

Mr Betts said the major arterial roads EastLink and the Western Ring Road had generated economic growth when they were built by shifting manufacturing, freight and warehousing industries out of Melbourne's middle suburbs and into the outer suburbs, ''and that's a powerful argument for the new east-west link''.

The department recently estimated that three of Victoria's biggest transport projects - the CityLink toll road, the Western Ring Road and the Melbourne underground rail loop - ''had added $20 billion to gross state product in 2010-11 alone'', Mr Betts said. The tunnel would also transform Alexandra Parade from a choked inner-city arterial into a ''modern boulevard'', with improved priority for buses and bicycles and a better run for the four intersecting north-south tram routes.
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The east-west tunnel is the Baillieu government's top transport priority.

The 18-kilometre project would start from the Western Ring Road in Sunshine, cut through the western suburbs and over the Maribyrnong River, then run in a tunnel under the inner northern suburbs to link with the Eastern Freeway.

But the state opposition has said it will proceed only with building a western link, connecting the ring road with CityLink.

Shadow ports minister Tim Pallas, speaking yesterday at a Labor transport policy forum, said Melbourne's most urgent transport need was for a second river crossing to ease congestion on the West Gate Bridge.

''We cannot consign communities such as the outer western suburbs and those dependent on the economic fortunes of freight delivery to being so poorly serviced by a road that is already at full capacity,'' Mr Pallas said.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/tunnel-is-right-says-transport-tsar-20120819-24gmm.html