We had our regular meeting yesterday at 730am with Metro Tunnel.

A lot of news, some good, some bad.

Let’s start with the good news

The TBM’s are nearly at South Yarra, Millie should breakthrough in the next few days. Alice is a couple of weeks behind. They will then be trucked back to the acoustic shed ready for their trip to the city in early 2021.

The significance of this is twofold, when only one TBM runs we seem to get less vibration. When no TBMs run, we get no trucks…..so HOPEFULLY the vibration will reduce next week and the trucks by end of October. So all the planets will line up at the wrong time….when you are finally able to get out of your apartment, it will be OK to be here. All will start again early in 2021 for around 5 months.

By the end of 2021, Edmund Herring Oval plant will be shutdown and the equipment removed. They will continue to use it but that noisy plant will be gone.

The not so good news…

They have done a stack of work on vibration, unfortunately with little success. You can see the super techie stuff in the report (I will post without the techie stuff for now…still waiting on a copy). I’m not happy with results but I can see that they are trying.

Trucks are a much bigger issue – we have installed a speed check system but CYP have questioned whether you can accurately determine the truck speed from video footage. I did note that the system is not super accurate, I am fairly confident that trucks tracked at over 60 kmph were probably exceeding the 40 kmph limit. The check on Saturday night of 45 trucks showed the average speed being 50 kmph with 80% of them exceeding 44 kmph (I allowed for 10% error).

Trucks are also still travelling on the wrong routes and consistently have uncovered loads.

CYP tell me that they are working very hard to get the drivers to behave, I’m not sure the drivers are listening.

We were also informed that it is not possible to fix the two damaged road areas out the front that cause the ‘truck bounce’.

Finally some ‘so so’ news..

Albert Rd Reserve is getting a special makeover….see pictures in the attachment