Subscribe to RSS$430m Victoria Park Motorway Tunnel Project Starts
Work on the 440-metre long motorway tunnel under Victoria Park - a $430m project - starts on Monday.
On Monday, the work will be on widening the southern side of SHI along St Marys Bay from Shelly Beach offramp to Fanshawe St offramp.
Lower speed limits (70k) are being placed along that stretch and lanes will be narrowed to accommodate the work.
Work on the actual tunnel starts around January.
The project is starting almost a year earlier than previously planned, because of Steven Joyce’s billion dollar boost for state highways. The Victoria Park bottleneck was named by the government as a “Road of National Significance”, meaning it was ear-marked for priority treatment. More than 100,000 vehicles presently use this route daily.
The project involves increasing the capacity of St Mary’s Bay from 4-lanes in each direction to 5-lanes northbound, and 5-lanes southbound with a southbound bus lane Increasing the capacity across Victoria Park from 2-lanes in each direction to 3-lanes northbound (in a new tunnel) and 4-lanes southbound (on the existing Victoria Park Viaduct).
A consortium called V Formation, made up of Fletcher Construction, Beca Engineering, Higgins Contractors and Australian consultancy Parsons Brinckerhoff, was awarded the work.
120 people will be working on the project within 6 months, rising to about 300 by the middle of next year.
9 Comments
I thought this was going to cost $430 million, has the price come down..?
Glad you’re on the ball tonight Jeremy. It is 430m. I was looking at my own bank account at the time. Sadly its 30m or so short of that, otherwise I’d happy fund the project. LOL
Great that this is underway. Although I am a huge fan of cycling and public transport, the reality is we need to fix our motorway network too. With the Vic Park tunnel (part 1 of 2 hopefully) and the Newmarket Viaduct, the central city will be pretty well dealt with.
Now, how about a new, stunning, landmark bridge to the North Shore, with rail, pedestrian and cycling provision on it from day 1?
From talking to a certian roading engineer this tunnel is pretty poorly designed (due to physical constraints) and is a pretty desperate (and expensive) measure to deal with congestion…
Why are they doing this? I forget.
A great project starting, I heard that it will have 600 people working on the site at one stage in the project, which is great for the economy, however in general having 300 people working is very good. A much needed project and one of the important roading projects that actually need to go ahead.
There are doing it because the current Vic Park viaduct is only two lanes in each direction causing a huge bottleneck in the system…
This is one of the few roading projects that I am a fan of. It is the last piece of the puzzle (along with Newmarket viaduct) in fixing up the central motorway junction. It should also make a huge difference to congestion on the harbour bridge.
However, $1 million a metre….. crikey that’s expensive!
Yeah, it’d only cost a few million more to build the damn thing out of Gold…