North East Link

[RoadsMaps]

New video of proposed route here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SwrEWmNp08

[c2R]

Nice. Er, which city is it though? I'm guessing Australia by your location... It's the first time I've seen cricket grounds so nicely represented in a road fly though video!

[Nicholas]

The blurb on the You Tube page says Melbourne.

[Truvelo]

It looks like Melbourne wants to outdo Toronto in the use of C/D roads.

[Peter Freeman]

It looks like Melbourne wants to outdo Toronto in the use of C/D roads.

Not quite Highway 401, but getting close.

The NEL is a major project, long-discussed, and now certain to proceed whichever political party wins the Victorian state election in November. It's possible that a new Liberal government would scale it back slightly (vandals!), but on the positive side they would add to it a complementary road tunnel known as the East-West Link.

On the subject of road widths (number of lanes), Sydney has, for the last 20 years or so, had a section of the Warringah Freeway, north of the harbour bridge and tunnel, that briefly expands to around 14 lanes.

Melbourne went through the freeway doldrums in the 1980's under an extremely green Labor goverment, but that party has fortunately changed its spots and both sides of politics, throughout AU, are now committed to major infrastructure projects, including roads.

In Melbourne, the finishing touches are being made to a major expansion of the M2 Tullamarine Freeway. It features extensive use of C/D roads on one 4km stretch, with brief expansions to 18 and 16 lanes. The recently improved M1 Westgate Freeway near the CBD briefly grows to about 18 lanes. The Westgate Tunnel Project is widening the M1 a little further west to 12 lanes. This will run for 6 km, and will expand to around 15 lanes near the tunnel portals.

[Peter Freeman]

Construction of the North East Link and upgrade of the M3 will introduce, at Grimshaw Street and at Doncaster Road, Melbourne's sixth and seventh Single Point Diamond interchanges. The M3 already features two of the current five.

[jackal]

You can see drawings of the plans at the link below. The scheme is best thought of as having two elements - (1) the North East Link proper, which is a largely tunnelled route filling the gap between the eastern end of the M80 and the M3 Eastern Freeway at Bulleen Road; and (2) upgrade to the Eastern Freeway with widening and C/D lanes.

https://northeastlink.vic.gov.au/__data ... t-2018.pdf

[RoadsMaps]

https://northeastlink.vic.gov.au/__data ... t-2018.pdf

Thanks for this.
Although they’re artist impressions, it is very curious to see M47 and B970 designations.
Personally, I think this project is stunningly over-engineered.
And I do think Melbourne is (foolishly) trying to emulate the Canadian 400-series en masse.

[jackal]

https://northeastlink.vic.gov.au/__data ... t-2018.pdf

Thanks for this.
Although they’re artist impressions, it is very curious to see M47 and B970 designations.
Personally, I think this project is stunningly over-engineered.
And I do think Melbourne is (foolishly) trying to emulate the Canadian 400-series en masse.

The history of such roads suggests it's more likely underengineered than over. D3 with no hard shoulder (as in the tunnels) is really not a lot for the main ringroad of a city of Melbourne's size and may be more a matter if technical limitations (eg if it's bored there is no four lane wide TBM) than anything else.

I suppose the Eastern Freeway C/D lanes are more what you had in mind, though it does seem intuively plausible that, if you have a busy radial motorway that is going to start double duty as an orbital, it will need a lot more lanes. Certainly there's a lot to be said for building the necessary capacity from the start, rather than providing the minimum, with endless expenditure and disruption thereafter on squeezing an extra lane in where you can a la the (UK) M25.

[Peter Freeman]

Personally, I think this project is stunningly over-engineered.

This is definitely not over-engineered. The M3 is already very busy, even before the NEL joins it.

The rest of the Ring Road is either 4 or 5 lanes per direction, with a shoulder that may eventually be converted to a running lane (Lane Use Mgmt brackets already waiting on some gantries), as has happened on many of Melbourne's freeways. The rest of the Ring Road, and the Westgate Freeway that sort-of forms a part of it, and Tullamarine Freeway that connects to it, all have areas of C/D lanes. More are being added - currently on the Westgate Freeway's western section, and soon on the Ring Road at Edgars Road and near Boundary Road. I think it's only the limited capacity of the Ringwood D3 tunnels that held the designers back from providing even more M3 capacity.

... and may be more a matter of technical limitations (eg if it's bored there is no four lane wide TBM) than anything else.

TBMs are custom-ordered per project and I'm sure a bigger one could be made, although parallel tunnels might be more practical. Perhaps it is thought pointless to super-size the Greensborough tunnels when the Ringwood constraint exists.

… a busy radial motorway that is going to start double duty as an orbital …

The north-south section of this project will serve double-duty from the word go. How the "M47" might develop in the future, if at all, is quite unknown (it's the former route for the Ring Road), but it does carry traffic city-bound from far-NE suburbs. Fortunately those hilly areas are not planned to develop strongly.

Certainly there's a lot to be said for building the necessary capacity from the start, rather than providing the minimum, with endless expenditure and disruption thereafter on squeezing an extra lane in where you can a la the (UK) M25.

Indeed so. Melbourne has experienced plenty of costly short-sightedness of that type.

Although they’re artist impressions, it is very curious to see M47 and B970 designations.

If you look carefully you'll also see a C939. These are anticipating the introduction of alpha-numeric route numbering on the Metropolitan network. The most curious item is the Greensborough Highway getting M47, which is the correct prefix in that location for a RURAL road - similar to the way that M420 branches off M780 south of Dandenong. So where does VicRoads hope that M47 might eventually go to?! Of course, these are not necessarily final designations.

[jackal]

... and may be more a matter of technical limitations (eg if it's bored there is no four lane wide TBM) than anything else.

TBMs are custom-ordered per project and I'm sure a bigger one could be made, although parallel tunnels might be more practical. Perhaps it is thought pointless to super-size the Greensborough tunnels when the Ringwood constraint exists.

An existing TBM can be re-used in certain circumstances: https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/service ... hment.html

But in any case the point I was making is that it's generally not considered economical to build a TBM wide enough for a four lane carriageway - hence why none have ever been built. (One was ordered but then cancelled for a scheme in St Petersburg.)

As you say, multiple bores would be a more likely way of providing additional capacity, or even twin bores each with a double deck 2+2 arrangement (which has a lower diameter requirement than four lanes on one carriageway).

[Peter Freeman]

That's a very interesting company in your link! I looked in their references for the two Melbourne Westgate Tunnel TBMs, which are currently being manufactured in China by a German company, but I didn't see them. Perhaps another German company …

Regarding refurbishment and re-use: also interesting. With the currently proposed timings, perhaps our NEL project can re-use the Westgate leftovers.

Funnily enough, I have, on the desk beside me, a cardboard popout-and-assemble model of one of those machines - picked up at an exhibition recently. Waiting to be popped!

A rough calculation of bore diameters suggests to me that a 4-lane tunnel using two decks would be just about the same diameter as a 3-lane side-by-side (which is 15.6m for the Westgate tunnels). Tempting hey …?!

[jackal]

Yes, the diameter requirement is about the same for 3 lane versus 2+2. In fact in Nanjing there are two twin-tube tunnels under the Yangtze, with all four tubes at 14.93m diameter, but with the older pair in 3 lane configuration and the newer in 2+2:

https://www.tunneltalk.com/TBM-Recorder ... anjing.php

PS Herrenknecht did provide the TBMs for the nearby scheme:

https://www.premier.vic.gov.au/building ... -machines/

[Peter Freeman]

An existing TBM can be re-used in certain circumstances: https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/service ... hment.html

I was recently informed, reliably, that the four TBMs imminently to be launched for the Melbourne Metro (rail) project will be re-used soon afterwards. There's no definitive next project yet, but I can guess several candidates.

[Peter Freeman]

An 'early works' contract is now underway for this project, with 'major works' to begin in 2021 and the full opening in 2027 - a long time to wait! It will be tolled, but by the Victoria state government, not a private operator (a good approach, in my view).

Here are links to some slightly updated design videos -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFcNVmg ... _rel_pause
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BurPL28y6Js

Project website -
https://northeastlink.vic.gov.au/

[Truvelo]

I'm just amazed at how such a wide stretch of motorway is being built through an urban area these days. If only similar roads were planned for London

[Peter Freeman]

I'm just amazed at how such a wide stretch of motorway is being built through an urban area these days. If only similar roads were planned for London

NEL is quite impressive, but check out the upgrade plans for I4 in Orlando -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWGglDMp9bU

[Truvelo]

The Orlando scheme appears to require hardly any demolition of existing property but then the Yanks build their roads with generous right of way to allow easy widening.

[Peter Freeman]

The Orlando scheme appears to require hardly any demolition of existing property but then the Yanks build their roads with generous right of way to allow easy widening.

True. I was more drooling on the grand multi-carriageway scale of the I4 finished product.

The NEL is demolishing very little property because it, like the I4, is in a foresightful long-standing reservation - it dates from Melbourne's grand freeway plan of 1969. However, some of this city's new builds and widenings have needed to be shoe-horned in. And there are many places where reservations were short-sightedly sold off and are now covered in homes.

In Australia we're quite prepared to overcome the right-of-way problem when necessary by tunnelling. Hence the tunnel on NEL, and especially the multiple underground roads beneath Sydney. In another thread Sabre recently touched on the London Motorway Box dream, and the possibility of executing that (or at least some of it) in tunnels. I'm not sure why the difference arises, but we'd do it and you won't (and I'm not saying you should).

[Chris5156]

I'm not sure why the difference arises, but we'd do it and you won't (and I'm not saying you should).

In part it's a question of whether you want to encourage more people to drive and whether your city could sustain that. London has a population density more than ten times that of Sydney*, so in general, people who live there are less likely to have somewhere they can park a car when it's at home, less likely to have somewhere to park it while they're at work, and streets are much older and therefore have less capacity to carry streams of motor vehicles than the relatively wide suburban roads that make up much of Australian cities.

So yes, you could make a case for building tunnelled motorways under London, like those built in Sydney, but all journeys would use the existing street network at the start of its journey, or at the end of it, or both, because those tunnelled roads would not allow access to property. And the capacity of the existing street network to absorb the extra trips that would be induced by the convenience and speed of the tunnelled roads is nil. Tunnelling would be the easy and cheap part of the job compared with solving that problem.

I don't think it's about the lack of will to dig tunnels; it's about how much motor traffic it's desirable to have in a city as old and as dense as London is.

* Sydney has ~400 people per square kilometre, London has ~5,600 people per square kilometre. That makes London's density ten times that of Sydney on average, but it includes vast areas of mid-20th century suburbia that are not very dense and also some outlying areas that are barely populated at all. Pushing up that average is Inner London which is extremely densely populated and all the problems above would be far more acute than the average density for the whole metropolis would suggest. Sydney has a lower population density even than Los Angeles County, which is by anyone's standards sprawling and car-dependent.

It's also worth noting that the last time London was looking to build a network of urban motorways in an attempt to provide the sort of roads that Sydney has, the population of London was one million fewer people than today and forecast to fall by another one or two million in the decades that followed, which it did. So London's own urban motorway plans were from an era when population density was much lower than today and falling still further.

I expect there's a long and tedious argument to be had about population density depending on how widely the city's boundaries are drawn, but the point stands that Sydney is a far less dense and motor-friendly city than London.