MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA:Half CityLink opens

MCL is by far the largest toll road in the world ever built by private investors, without a cent of taxpayer money. Cost of construction is $1.3b and the shares of the owner Transurban City Link Limited are traded on Australian stock exchanges. MCL is the world’s second fully automated multi interchange toll road system after highway 407-ETR in Toronto - no cash tolls are collected on the road. The 3.4km Burnley tunnel is claimed as the longest 3-lane vehicular tunnel built, though a pair of 4km 3-laners are under consideration in Dallas TX. (see LBJ I-635 piece p1)

Melbourne is the second city of Australia with a population of about 3.2m and close to 2m motor vehicles. MCL links up three major radial motorways two of which fell short by several miles of the central business district and forms an L-shape, enclosing the central business district on its western and southern sides. It will be the only toll facility in the state of Victoria.

The Western Link involves a 6km widening of the airport Tullamarine Freeway (2x2 to 2x4), then construction of 4.4km of new 2x3-lane elevated highway including the Bolte bridge over the Yarra River to an IC with the Westgate Fwy. This Western Link is being dubbed a Gateway to the city and has two ICs for connections to city streets and some spectacular efforts at civic sculpture consisting of large angled beams and light effects, and a long oval section tube spanning 6-lanes divided that does double duty as a noise attenuator. (TRnl#36 Feb 99 p14) The Bolte bridge of balanced cantilever concrete box girder design has a pair of towering 140m high pillars of purely artistic value.

Beyond the bridge the existing elevated Westgate Fwy peters out 1.8km east of the new IC with the Western Link. The second part of the project, the Southern Link is a 4.5km extension eastward to the Southeastern now renamed Monash Freeway. Within that 4.5km are (1) an eastbound 3-lane tunnel 3.4km long driven under inner city parks, the river and the inner suburb of Burnley (Burnley tunnel) and (2) a 1.6km 3-lane driven and cut and cover tunnel for westbound traffic under the inner city parks (Domain Tunnel) and a widening of an existing riverbank roadway. Then follows 3km of widening (2x2 to 2x3) of the elevated part of the Monash Fwy. (There looks to be a serious traffic engineering mistake at the merge of 2 eastbound lanes from Punt Rd on the riverbank roadway with 3-lanes exiting from the Burnley Tunnel where 5-lanes suddenly go to 3-lanes. North American practice would have had an extended 4-lanes eastward beyond the merge to prevent backups into the tunnel.) A 1.5km Exhibition St Connector half of which is elevated over rail yards provides a new connection to city streets with the southeast. The system has extensive traffic monitoring, message signs and a control center.

By our calculation the project is 74 lane-km of new pavement over 18km of route, or $17.5/lane-km, $72m/km (all $s US). It has many of the inner-city high water table engineering challenges of Boston’s Central Artery but on a smaller scale. Its scale is comparable with stage one of Toronto’s 407-ETR and it is a shade larger than America’s second highway project Salt Lake City’s I-15 reconstruction. It is being built a lot faster than Boston’s Central Artery but slower than 407 and I-15 UT.

Construction of MCL has been a challenge because of extremely varied soil conditions including much deep river mud and slush, the need to maintain existing road traffic, electric trains and trolleys and to repair, enlarge or replace many old bridges, and to deal with vocal citizen groups.

There will be 8 toll points in the system at which open-road highway-speed electronic tolling will be conducted from single gantries with patrons using European CEN-standard 5.8Ghz backscatter read-write tags. They are being marketed as “e-TAGs.” A machine vision video system on the gantries will detect and classify vehicles. Vehicles detected without transponders have their front license plate recorded and read. If the patrons have called up the customer service center and paid $4.20 for a day pass beforehand they are valid. They can drive the road without a tag or a pass and until noon the next day pay $5.30 for a “Late Pass.” If they don’t do that they are a violator.

There were early problems with a customer service contractor which was fired, and delays in getting the electronic toll system working properly in small tests and simulations. Also, noone knows all the problems of a new system until the tolling starts with live traffic. Fingers crossed!

It will be a first for open road tolling using 5.8GHz backscatter equipment. Being an inner city system, quite high traffic volumes are likely. The toll rates are $1.40 from the airport to the north of the CBD, $2.10 over the bridge into South Melb, $2.45 maximum toll, all for cars, with light commercial paying 60% premium and heavy a 90% premium. The only concession to variable pricing is that heavy trucks will get a discount of 90% down to the car toll rate 8pm to 6am.

Construction is by a joint venture of Transfield and Obayashi. The Melbourne City Link Auth is a small state of Victoria government agency established to monitor Transurban’s adherence to the build-own-operate and transfer contract on which the project was based. Under the concession, which is for 34 years, tolls can increase at the larger of 4.5%/yr or the CPI. The Southern Link is due to open before the end of the year. Construction began May 96.

(www.transurban.com.au & www.citylink.

vic.gov.au A nice video “Melbourne’s Link to the Future” is available from www.infosentials.com, for US specify NTSC)