More traffic lanes and new safety barriers will be added to EJ Whitten Bridge as part of the next stage of the M80 Ring Road upgrade, the state government has announced.
Minister for Roads and Safety Luke Donnellan was joined by Sydenham MP Natalie Hutchins and St Albans MP Natalie Suleyman at the bridge on Tuesday to announce the extension from Sunshine Avenue to the east of the bridge.
The upgrade will include works to strengthen and widen the bridge to create more traffic lanes.
It will also include new public safety barriers – which the community has long been campaigning for – with temporary barriers to be installed during construction.
Mr Donnellan said the government was getting on with projects that were needed so that people would spend less time stuck in traffic.
“The upgrade will ease congestion, cut travel times and make the commute safer and more reliable for the 160,000 drivers using the freeway every day,” Mr Donnellan said.
Ms Hutchins said the safety barriers were an especially important addition which addressed the community’s safety concerns.
“The community has campaigned for the safety barriers on EJ Whitten Bridge. We’ve listened and we’re building them,” Ms Hutchins said.
“More than 330 people were hurt and four people died driving on the M80 Ring Road in a five-year period – that’s not good enough,” she said.
“We’re making this upgrade to make this road safer.”
This stage of the project will also support the Victorian economy by creating almost 1000 direct and indirect jobs, Mr Donnellan said.
The Sunshine Avenue interchange will also be upgraded and widened to allow more traffic to enter and exit the freeway including new ramp signals on the Greensborough-bound entry to allow traffic to merge safely.
The works will also remove the bottleneck at Sunshine Avenue, where the lanes currently merge from four lanes into two.
Expression of interest will be sought in August, with the contract for the works expected to be awarded in early 2016.
Works are planned to start in mid-2016.
The full M80 Ring Road upgrade is a $2.25 billion project jointly funded by the commonwealth and state governments.
