BWA | JUL 2026 7 North East Link is one of those infrastructure projects that is best understood not as a single road, tunnel or interchange, but as a long-delayed piece of metropolitan logic finally being put into place. For decades, Melbourne’s freeway network has had a conspicuous gap in the north east: the missing connection between the M80 Ring Road and the Eastern Freeway. North East Link is designed to close that gap, giving freight, commuters and cross-city traffic a more direct route while taking pressure off the suburban roads that have long carried traffic they were never really designed to handle. Victoria’s Big Build describes the project as the biggest ever investment in Melbourne’s north east, with the 6.5-kilometre tunnels from Watsonia to Bulleen intended to take 15,000 trucks off local roads each day and reduce travel times by up to 35 minutes. That is the clean public promise of the project: less time lost in traffic, fewer trucks on local streets, and a more complete orbital road network for Melbourne. But the reason North East Link makes such a strong Project
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