BWA | JUL 2026 13 in July 2025 marked the first permanent road section to open as part of the project, while also allowing traffic to keep moving as crews continue building the tunnel entrance and major interchange that will eventually connect the Eastern Freeway to the 6.5-kilometre tunnels. The Bulleen Road Interchange milestone also illustrates the scale of the physical works. To build the new 270-metre section of Bulleen Road, crews installed more than 100 of the largest Super T beams ever built in Victoria, each up to 43 metres long and weighing up to 126 tonnes. Details like that help bring the project out of abstraction. This is the kind of infrastructure where every milestone depends on heavy lifts, night works, traffic staging, community disruption planning, supply chain coordination and careful sequencing between temporary and permanent works. The project’s community-facing design has also evolved in response to feedback. Victoria’s Big Build says the tunnel design was lengthened to 6.5 kilometres, with simpler interchanges, five MCGs of parkland along Banyule Creek at Borlase Reserve, a new two-kilometre tree-lined Greensborough Road boulevard, a twohectare Yarra Link green bridge over Bulleen Road, and three new wetlands along the Yarra River and Koonung Creek in Bulleen and Balwyn North. That part of the project is worth emphasising because major road projects often face criticism for dividing communities or prioritising cars at the expense of local amenity. North East Link is still a road project, and a major one, but its design response shows how expectations have changed. The project has had to include parkland, wetlands, green bridges, tree canopy, shared paths and better active transport connections as part of its
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