Residents in a pocket of Yarraville that will see a predicted 7600 trucks drive past their homes daily after completion of the West Gate Tunnel have called for the government to buy them out.
The West Gate Tunnel is a new tollway that will widen the West Gate Freeway to 12 lanes and also tunnel under Yarraville to link the West Gate to CityLink.
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Building the West Gate tunnel
The West Gate Tunnel, originally known as the Western Distributor, is a proposed 5km tollway to link the West Gate Freeway at Yarraville with CityLink at Docklands.
The $5.5 billion project is due to start next year and open in 2022.
Truck volumes in Francis Street in Yarraville will drop by a predicted 5000 vehicles a day as a result of the project's truck bans.
But in nearby Hyde Street, there will be a predicted jump of 1600 fuel tankers.
Residents in 11 homes on the street, opposite the Yarraville fuel terminal, already see 6000 trucks a day roar past them.
Once the new road is built this will jump dramatically.
"I am potentially facing having a mortgage higher than the value of my home," said Laura Meese, spokeswoman for the Hyde Street Residents Group.
She said residents who lived in the small pocket had bought their homes cheaply because they are in a compromised location. "We could only afford them because of where they are," she said.
But Ms Meese said no one in the area had bought knowing about the government's proposed 24-hour truck ban on all surrounding arterial roads. The group started campaigning last year, but the new truck bans had made their plight worse, she said.
One property in the strip, a three-bedroom home now on the market for $750,000, recently failed to sell at auction.
The proposed truck ban will benefit other Yarraville residents, but will funnel all trucks wanting to get to the area onto this part of Hyde Street.
The government has promised repeatedly that no homes will be needed to be taken for the project.
"A core principle was to avoid the acquisition of residential property," a report released on Monday by Roads Minister Luke Donnellan​ said.
Ms Meese said this was a political response by Labor to the forced home acquisitions in the dumped East West Link project.
"It's been designed to retrofit their political needs rather than the needs of residents here," she said. "How can you put a new off-ramp 300 metres from my door, and push [thousands] of extra trucks a day past my front yard and tell me that my amenity won't change?"
A spokeswoman for the Western Distributor Authority said the 11 houses near the corner of Francis Street and Hyde Street were not needed for the construction of the project.
She said residents "have the opportunity to make a submission through the environment effects statement [process] about how the project might affect them".Â
Meghan Segat is among those living on the section of Hyde Street affected. She said the truck bans would help others in the area but hurt her family.Â
"It will put trucks on our street 24 hours a day," she said.
And she said the impacts were serious.Â
"The more research we've done, the more dangerous we've realised these trucks are," she said. "Is my daughter going to be able to even play in our backyard anymore?"
The government's report also reveals that another part of the area, Millers Road in Altona and Brooklyn, will see "a projected increase of up to 7000 trucks per day" by 2031.
The government admits that this will lead to "reduced amenity and safety" for residents "on the western side of Millers Road".
And there will be "a marginal increase" in pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as a result of the road, instead of a minor reduction if the new tollway was not built.
An artist's impression of the tunnel entrance in West Melbourne. Photo: Western Distributor Authority
The reports also make clear that almost 3000 trees will be cut down to build the road, before a promised 17,500 are replanted once the project is complete.
"There is an assumed loss of all trees from within the design footprint" of the road, the reports said. In total 917,500 plants will go in as part of the project, the government says.
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