Monash Freeway

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Monash Freeway

First opened:	1973
Length:	34 kilometres
From:	Kooyong
To:	Berwick, Melbourne
Speed Limit	km/h
Suburbs along freeway:	Chadstone, Mulgrave, Doveton, Narre Warren North
Major interchanges along freeway:	Toorak Road Warrigal Road Springvale Rd Stud Road South Gippsland Freeway Princes Hwy

Monash Freeway is a freeway linking Melbourne's CBD to its southeastern suburbs and the Gippsland region.

1 History
2 Interchanges

[edit] History

The Monash Freeway is an amalgamation of two initially separate freeways: the Mulgrave Freeway (initially designated with a F-81 shield) linking Springvale Road, Mulgrave to the Princes Highway in Hallam; and the South Eastern Freeway (initially designated with a F-80 shield) linking Punt Road, Richmond and Burke Road, Glen Iris.

[edit] Mulgrave Freeway

Initial construction on the Mulgrave Freeway started in 1970 and was completed in 1973, with bi-directional interchanges with Heatherton and Stud Roads. Later in the 1970s and in the early 1980s it was progressively extended westward to Forster Road - with additional interchanges at Ferntree Gully, Jacksons (and eventually Police Road many years later), Wellington, and Blackburn Roads - then to Huntingdale Road, and finally to Warrigal Road in Chadstone. Construction at the Hallam end extended underneath an interchange at the Princes Highway and southwards along the old alignment of the South Gippsland Highway to the interchange with Hastings-Dandenong Road (Dandenong-Hastings Road, now the Westenport Highway) at Lyndhurst; this section was later renamed as the South Gippsland Freeway. The F-81 designation was lost in the early 1980s and the freeway was never redesignated another route until some years later.

Interestingly at this time the Tullamarine Freeway also carried the F-81 route designation. A look at the 1969 freeway plan of Melbourne shows a likely reason. The two freeways were to be linked to each other from around East Malvern (at the Mulgrave Freeway end) and at Flemington (at the Tullamarine Freeway end), sweeping through the St Kilda area. The plan never came to fruition, however the two freeways have been linked by the West Gate Freeway extension and the CityLink project.

[edit] South Eastern Freeway

Initial construction of the South Eastern Freeway had completed by the mid-1960s, connecting Burnley to Olympic Park at Harcourt Parade, which fed traffic to Punt Road at the Hoddle Bridge: an overpass across Punt Road quickly followed to end at Anderson Street and the Morell Bridge, with a single-carriageway feeder road to the Swan Street Bridge (and Batman Avenue) 800 metres beyond. The freeway was eventually further extended east from Burnley under the MacRobertson bridge along the Yarra, to Toorak Road (with a single-carriageway feeder road taking excess traffic to Burke Road), completed in 1971. The F-80 designation was lost very early in the project, having been replaced with a metro 80 blue shield which lasted until the late 1980s.

[edit] South Eastern Arterial link

The resulting gap between the Toorak/Burke Road end of the South Eastern Freeway and the Warrigal Road end of the Mulgrave Freeway frustrated drivers for many years, needing to rely increasingly on feeder roads to bridge the distance between them. The State Government proposed a road to connect them during the mid-1980s, before finally agreeing on an alignment and allowing construction to commence on a dual-carriageway link between the freeways; construction finished in 1988, and the link - and later the entire length of the now-connected freeway, from the city to Hallam - was re-christened as the South Eastern Arterial; the new stretch of road also re-designated with the State 1 shield.

The project attracted a great deal of controversy just before it opened and well afterwards: in order to save costs, only one freeway-style interchange had been constructed (underneath High Street in Glen Iris). Every other interchange with major roads along the route (Toorak, Burke, Tooronga and Warrigal Roads) was an at-grade intersection controlled by traffic-lights, and due to the fact that the road was constructed through residential areas, reduced speed limits were also enforced. This led to heavy congestion, frequently kilometres long, on the freeway, fuelling anger and frustration, and even attracting a rather-apt moniker of "the South-Eastern Carpark".

With a change of government several years later and a lot of poitical showmanship, more money was poured into the link road, constructing underpassed interchanges at Toorak and Burke Roads (and just an underpass at Tooronga Road), and a new overpass across Warrigal Road. New noise barriers and extra lanes were also constructed, and the freeway 'upgrade' was completed and the entire length renamed back to the South Eastern Freeway, before changing name again to the now-current Monash Freeway, named after the Monash University and Local Government Area, and indirectly after Sir John Monash, an Australian soldier and engineer. The improved road dramatically improved the rate of out-bound traffic, however the bottleneck at the Swan Street bridge still remained and the queues only got longer. A portion of the Monash Freeway at the city end (from Toorak to Punt Roads) was eventually incorporated into the CityLink project in the late 1990s by way of tunnels underneath the city to link to the eastern-end of the Westgate Freeway, allowing for an uninterrupted voyage past the CBD.

[edit] Hallam bypass

The freeway was extended by 7.5 km in late 2003 when the Hallam Bypass was completed after 3 years of construction (also opening 6 months ahead of schedule and A$80 million under budget), connecting the Monash Freeway in Hallam to the Princes Freeway in Berwick. The sweeping curve of the freeway at the Hallam end that became the South Gippsland Freeway had its capacity reduced from three lanes to two, resulting in a notorious bottle-neck at peak hours, especially for out-bound traffic exiting at the Princes Highway interchange outside Dandenong; the extension finally bypassed the entire problem. Once completed, using the Monash Freeway made it possible to travel from Beaconsfield in the south-east of Melbourne, all the way into Corio in the north-east of Geelong - via CityLink and the Westgate and Princes Freeways, some 110 km - without stopping at a single set of traffic lights.

The entire stretch of the Monash Freeway bears the designation M1.

[edit] Interchanges

The Monash Freeway officially begins at the Princes Highway (Berwick) interchange from the Princes Freeway:

Princes Highway , Berwick: bi-directional
Narre Warren North Road , Narre Warren: bi-directional
Ernst Wanke Road, Narre Warren: city-bound only
Belgrave-Hallam Road, Hallam: bi-directional
South Gippsland Freeway , Hallam
Heatherton Road , Endeavour Hills: bi-directional
Stud Road , Dandenong: bi-directional
EastLink, Dandenong North (Currently under construction. Completion due in 2008): bi-directional (limited)
Police Road/Jacksons Road, , Mulgrave {Waverley Park): city-bound at Jacksons Road, out-bound at Police Road
Wellington Road , Mulgrave: bi-directional (limited)
Springvale Road , Mulgrave: out-bound only
Ferntree Gully Road , Glen Waverley: city-bound only
Blackburn Road , Mount Waverley: bi-directional (out-bound onramp off adjacent England Road)
Forster Road, Mount Waverley: bi-directional
Huntingdale Road , Chadstone: out-bound only
Warrigal Road , Chadstone: bi-directional
High Street , Glen Iris: city-bound only (onramp off adjacent Wills Street)
Burke Road , Glen Iris: bi-directional
Toorak Road , Kooyong: bi-directional
- After the Toorak Road interchange, the Monash Freeway comes under the southern link of CityLink and is tolled. The city-bound carraigeway continues into the Domain Tunnel, CityLink, which joins the West Gate Freeway: the out-bound carriageway emerges from the Burnley Tunnel portal at Burnley.