After two years and $100 million of spending, the Tourle Street Bridge duplication is now officially open.
Regional Director for the RMS, Anna Zycki joined Parliamentary Secretary for the Hunter, Scot MacDonald in welcoming the project's completion today, 6 months ahead of schedule.
"From a project management point of view, this has been fantastic," Ms Zycki said, "we've delivered six months early and I'm really pleased with the result...
"There's environmental concerns we have to work through and special measures we have to take but we've done a great job and we're happy with our contractor," she said.
Ms Zycki said while bottlenecks are usually merely pushed further up the road following duplication projects, we're experiencing an unprecedented improvement to traffic at Kooragang.
Scot MacDonald agreed, saying motorists are reporting improved travel times by 20 minutes.
"It's more efficient, it's saving people time," he said, "it's one of our busiest roads, with 33,000 motorists making the commute here a day and that includes about 3000 heavy vehicles so it's going to help commuters, it's going to help people getting to the airport and getting into town."
The new infrastructure follows the controversial 2008 Labor decision to build a new single-lane bridge in replacement of the old one.
"If it was done properly 10 years ago, we wouldn't have had to spend $70 million," Mr MacDonald said, "so the taxpayers had to stump up all that extra money and wait a decade for this bridge and the duplication which should've been done in the first place."
Anna Zycki confirmed progress is on track for the connection to Industrial Drive, with some minor works to take place along the stretch "in the not too distant future."
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| Scot MacDonald, Anna Zycki and the Project Construction Team at Kooragang today. |
