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North East Link
“Some of the best engineers, designers and builders from across Australia
and around the world have worked for years
to refine the design of North East Link to ensure it delivers
the best outcome for the whole community.”
Duncan Elliott, Chief Executive of the North East Link project
Sunday Herald Sun, pg 30, 12 February 2023
"Failure does not come from the occasional, abnormal dysfunction or breakdown of . . .
structures, processes and tasks, but is an inevitable by-product of their normal functioning.
The same characteristics that guarantee the fulfilment of the organization's mandate
will turn out to be responsible for undermining that mandate."
Sidney Dekker, Preface to 'Drift into Failure', CRC Press 2011
North East Link is a major new freeway-to-freeway connection being built in the north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.
I support having a freeway link between the M80 Ring Road (freeway) and the M3 Eastern Freeway,
generally along the alignment of the North East Link (see my map on the web page The Wrong Design for Bulleen)
BUT there are serious design flaws in the section through Bulleen, due to major unscrutinised changes made to the design in 2021.
At its south end, the designs for North East Link in Bulleen will create serious congestion and road safety problems for local people.
These serious problems result from the major transport planning bungle by North East Link (now part of MRPV, Major Road Projects Victoria)
to remove the northerly ramps to/from the North East Link under-Yarra tunnels at Manningham Road. This new major freeway
to/from the north has no connection to the only major east-west arterial road it crosses (Bell Street - Banksia Street - Manningham Road).
Others have commented that the much longer tunnels (again, resulting from the major design change in 2021) will concentrate and exacerbate
air pollution problems at both ends of the tunnels, including near schools and playground in Bulleen and North Balwyn.
My discussion of the road safety and congestion problems is contained on this introductory page and the following four sub-pages
- see the images below:
(click on the image or the underlined title, below to reach each sub-page)
Why and how
has it gone so horribly wrong?
Complete Disinterest
in Providing
Safety for Local Road Users
Hubris by North East Link
and the State Government
Silly and dangerous designs & traffic management happening NOW -
on our way to North East Link Utopia
Extra projects that will
need to be funded.
Serious problems in inner Melbourne
IN A NUTSHELL: the Major Road Safety and Congestion Problems with North East Link in Bulleen
The removal of the northerly ramps (to/from the main tunnels) from near Manningham Road, and their relocation to Thompsons Road, adjacent to the Bulleen Road bridge over the Eastern Freeway. Dreadful design of the new ramp interchange, with dangerous turning movements and the risk of wrong way movements; congestion at the only bridge Bulleen residents have for access south over the Eastern Freeway.
The lack of a service road for the shops on the east side of Bulleen Road, just south of Manningham Road (actually between Noelle Street and Austin Street). Poor amenity and safety which could so easily be overcome at almost no extra cost, by shifting Bulleen Road slightly to the west.
Thoughtless design details along Bulleen Road (Thompsons Road to Manningham Road), including no completion of the bicycle lanes, lack of left turn deceleration lanes at most intersections, failure to link Ilma Court into Bulleen Road at the Golden Way signals.
The eastbound exit off the Eastern Freeway to Bulleen Road is a dangerous right-hand exit off the freeway-to-freeway ramp to North East Link. Very dangerous and cannot be signed safely (No indication in 2021 that NEL had changed this design despite specific advice by me in 2019).
Failure to deal with issues on Thompsons Road resulting from the expected increase in traffic ('Outside the scope of the project').
The Purpose of these North East Link Pages
Why am I documenting this sad saga of the North East Link? Because one day, after North East Link has been opened to traffic and the congestion and crash problems in Bulleen start happening (created by the shoddy design selected for the North East Link), people will ask "Why weren't these problems anticipated and fixed before the project was built?"
Others, in defence of North East Link will say it's all very well seeing these problems in hindsight, but they could not possibly be anticipated at the time.
Well, my response is that they could be anticipated at the time, and they have been - in 2019 and then from 2022 onwards.
All the people who were (from 2022 onwards) in a position to avoid these congestion and road safety problems in Bulleen were told by me about the problems and were offered the opportunity to discuss ways to avoid the problems. They chose not to accept those opportunities. They chose not to do any effective checking. They chose to listen to people who told them it was all under control. They chose not to be sceptical and listen to other views. They did so much that was the opposite of a 'High-Reliability Organisation'. These people include the Premier of Victoria, the Minister for Transport Infrastructure, the Chief Executive Officer of the Major Transport Infrastructure Authority and the Chief Executive Officer of North East Link (now part of Major Road Projects Victoria).
Of course, a better future reality can still occur if the state government now, before it is too late, sets up a design review by a panel of independent road safety experts who understand how to design roads safely. Let them provide an independent assessment of both the big issue (relocating the northerly ramps to Thompsons Road), as well as all the other detailed issues discussed in these web pages.
Rob Morgan, August 2024
NORTH EAST LINK HAS DANGEROUS DESIGN PROBLEMS IN BULLEEN
Here are some of the problems at North East Link's 'Forever Problem', the Thompsons Road interchange. See the web page The Wrong Design for Bulleen for more details
History Repeats Itself - Part 1
Back in July 1999, I and others publicly warned of the road safety and congestion problems that would happen with the shoddy arrangement of ramps proposed where the Bolte Bridge joins the West Gate Freeway. It was reported in The Age Newspaper in July 1999 (see below). The warnings were rejected. After the bridge opened there was an unsuccessful $3 million fix up, followed by two much more expensive total makeovers – all because the original advice was ignored.
On North East Link the state government has the opportunity to repeat all the mistakes that were made at the end of the Bolte Bridge. But the opportunities to fix them later do not exist. The Bolte Bridge is in an industrial area and all ramps are above ground. By contrast, Bulleen and North Balwyn are residential areas and the freeway is in tunnel. What North East Link is building in Bulleen is a 'forever problem'.
I have been making these warnings since the major changes to the North East Link design in Bulleen became evident on plans in May 2022.
It can be seen that on 6th July 1999, the minister said “We saw that there was going to be an issue and we fixed it.” History tells us otherwise. By 2005 VicRoads tried to fix it for $3.285 million (that’s what the blackspot funding sign said). That didn’t work and a completely new bridge and ramp had to be built, as I originally predicted. Unfortunately that design had its own problems and a third attempt was made in 2017. In all, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent fixing up a shoddy design for a new toll road.
At least the minister responded. These days that does not happen (well, not within a reasonable time, see the web page 'Complete Disinterest in Providing Safety for Local Road Users').
History Repeats Itself - Part 2
Opinion piece by Rob Morgan, February 2024:
$26 bn Link Cost is Just the Start
Late in 2023 there was much questioning about how North East Link’s cost blew out from $10 billion to $26 billion. The focus was on poor initial cost estimates for major road projects. This project is certainly needed. But if it continues to be built in its current form, the question once it opens will be ‘How did so much money get spent, only to create a gigantic traffic bottleneck and accident blackspot in Bulleen’. Endless, costly fix-ups are likely, to rectify the project’s many fundamental design flaws.
Sydney’s disastrous $3.9 billion Rozelle motorway interchange, opened in November 2023, points to what will happen in Bulleen. Bulleen’s future congestion and crash problems stem from the audacious removal of the major interchange near Manningham Road in 2021, shifting it to Thompsons Road. North East Link call this ‘a simplified Manningham Road interchange’ that will ‘remove 14,700 vehicles a day from Bulleen Road’. What they don’t mention is the increased traffic on Thompsons Road and the extra traffic that will continue to use Rosanna Road because access from Heidelberg to the tunnels under the Yarra (via Banksia Street) has been abandoned.
Instead, the ramps from the Yarra tunnels will emerge onto Thompsons Road, 1.7 km further south. This is right at an existing bottleneck where two arterial roads have to get across the Eastern Freeway on one bridge, mixed in with Eastern Freeway ramps. Plans for the new interchange have enough basic traffic design flaws to guarantee it will be a major accident blackspot and congestion hotspot.
Sydney’s recent Rozelle interchange experience is worth reflecting on. There, the traffic ‘modelling’ or forecasting got the traffic volumes and movements so wrong that thousands of people now have an extra half hour added to their daily commute, caused by a major project designed to reduce congestion. This has been described as a ‘forever problem’ now the tunnels are built. Melbourne’s traffic modellers are not immune from such mistakes: daily congestion entering and leaving the Ringwood Bypass at Eastlink is due to poor traffic modelling. Fixing the Thompsons Road interchange after it is built will be impossible without demolishing multiple houses and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new traffic lanes and ramps. Meanwhile, the site of the abandoned Manningham Road interchange ramps has been flattened for no good reason.
The immediate reasons for this bargain basement treatment of Bulleen lie in a different electorate. A freeway reservation has been in place beside Greensborough Road in Macleod for decades. The original North East Link design used this, putting the freeway out of the way in a deep cutting. But in 2022 this section was suddenly put in a tunnel, costing over $2 billion more. This had little to do with environmental concerns. At the same time the northerly ramps at Manningham Road were deleted, in favour of the cheaper Thompsons Road option. There was no opportunity for public comment or independent technical review.
Some parts of North East Link’s new design in Bulleen are very dangerous. Others are just penny-pinching, like not extending the bicycle lanes on Bulleen Road or providing a safe service road outside the Bulleen Road shops.
The root cause of these cost and road safety problems lies in this government’s political goal of dismantling VicRoads, achieved in 2019. A wealth of road safety and traffic expertise was lost. The road builders were rebadged as Major Road Projects Victoria. This has now been amalgamated with North East Link. Victoria’s deadly road safety history in the 1950s and 60s tells us of the dangers in having a state road agency dominated by road builders. That is why RoSTA and the Road Traffic Authority were established – and the road toll came down. There is no such counterbalance these days. It’s all about getting that big road project built.
Today large consortiums are engaged to do the state’s road design and construction work under a cloak of confidentiality agreements. There is virtually no opportunity to discover or discuss what is being designed. With government traffic safety skills lost, who is actually looking after the interests of the future road users?
I see project after project where poor contract arrangements and outsourced design processes are resulting in costly mistakes and needless road safety hazards. At North East Link, similar problems are happening, but on a much bigger scale. And the Thompsons Road interchange is the epicentre of these designed-in traffic disasters.
For residents of Bulleen, the site of the Thompsons Road interchange is our only way in and out to the south. We have nowhere else to go. Before this design disaster is built, the state government must urgently appoint an independent expert technical committee to review North East Link and all its associated designs in Bulleen. The north-oriented interchange must be returned to the Manningham Road – Greenaway Street site. The review must be headed by experienced experts in safe traffic design and be able to seek submissions and obtain independent advice. Otherwise the current $26 billion price tag will be just the start of what this project will cost us.
This article may be reproduced in full, with due acknowledgement.
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