innsertnamehere
Superstar
For comparison- a tunnel from the 427 to, say, the 404 would be about 20km. So smaller than WestConnnex. It wouldn’t be unprecedented globally.Yeah, I would not be surprised if Transurban were looking for another city to make lots of money from.
They've just finished covering (well, the underneath of) Sydney in new motorways - WestConnex. 33 kilometres of new tunnels that have been been heavily criticised - of course they're heavily tolled (around $10 Canadian for cars, at least 3x more for trucks - and the toll rises at 4% or inflation whichever is higher) ! Good article about them here.
The Rozelle Interchange is honestly impressive underground spaghetti!
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The problem about expanding the capacity of the 401 is this! Road widening is not the solution... in my opinion, road pricing is one way to reduce the vehicles on the road - but good luck finding politicians who will vote for that!
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WestConnex was a $20 billion AUD program, about $17b CAD. Australias road tunnelling expertise is at another level compared to Canada however so I suspect that pricing wouldn’t transfer that much.
I think the nature of a massive road tunnel is that much like WestConnex, local accesses to the highway will be limited. If the tunnel can be aimed at regional traffic, not commuting traffic, I think it could work. Limit exits to interchanges with other freeways only. 427-400-404, and that’s it, could do well to allow regional trucking and inter regional trips move better without people driving from Keele to their job at Yonge.
Regarding WestConnex’s tolls - $11 AUD is $1~$9.70 CAD. For 33km of tunnel, that works out to a toll rate of less than 1/2 of the 407ETR.
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