Deer Park Bypass

Location

The Deer Park Bypass is a proposed five kilometer (3.1 mile) freeway link between the Western Freeway (A8) at Rockbank, Australia, in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and the Western Ring Road (M80) in Sunshine.

Purpose

The point of the new freeway bypass is to move traffic off the over-stressed Western Highway, which takes traffic from the Western Ring Road. Due to the growth of the surrounding suburbs and the multiple traffic lights between the Western Ring Road and the start of the Western Freeway, substantial delays are created for the 50,000 vehicles per day on this stretch of road. While the bypass has been suggested since the Western ring road opened in the mid 1990s, in 2004 the federal government announced that the Deer Park Bypass was to be built as part of a 1.4 billion dollar project grant to Victoria. It has been suggested that, upon completion of the bypass, more than fifteen minutes will be saved when traveling through the Deer Park area. However, the project has been stalled amid funding quarrels.

External Links

• Newspaper report of funding battle
• 2003–2004 Department of Transport and Regional Services budget, with discussion of the Deer Park Bypass