Western Freeway (Victoria)
See also: Western Highway, Victoria and Ballarat Road, Melbourne
The Western Freeway is a 125 kilometre Australian freeway linking the state capital of Victoria (Melbourne) to the major regional city of Ballarat. Signed as M8, it used to branch off from the Western Highway (having come originally beyond the Victorian/South Australian border outside Adelaide) at Burrumbeet, 22 kilometres north-west of Ballarat, and now ends officially to Melbourne's freeway network via the Western Ring Road, in the middle western suburbs of Melbourne. Both the freeway and Western Highway beyond Ballarat are part of the National Highway network for the Melbourne-Adelaide route.
Plans are underway for the freeway to be extended west to Ararat, and eventually, to Stawell.
The Western Freeway subsumes and bypasses most sections of the older Western Highway. Former bypassed sections of the Western Highway are generally designated sequentially from C801 to C805, or Metropolitan Route 8 (although oddly enough, this used to still keep the old National Route 8 shield) (within suburban Melbourne).
The Melbourne section of the Western Highway is shown in the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan as part of the F12 Freeway corridor.
Read more about Western Freeway (Victoria): Deer Park Bypass, Anthony's Cutting Realignment, Future Upgrades, Towns, Exits and Intersections
Famous quotes containing the words western and/or freeway:
“Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)