Deer Park Bypass

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

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, since 1996 the project has been stalled amid funding quarrels. In November 2005 Peter Costello quoted; "We will fund the Deer Park bypass and it will be open to traffic in 2009". Contruction started on the Deer Park bypass in August 2006 and is expected to be finished by late 2009.