Arup to design and advise on upgrade of Australia's Bruce Highway
The Fulton Hogan Seymour Whyte Joint Venture has appointed Arup as designer for the upgrade of the Australian Bruce Highway between Caloundra Road and the Sunshine Motorway. The upgrade aims at improving safety, as well as reducing congestion – in addition resilience against one in a hundred year flood events are being designed and planned for.
The Bruce Highway is a 1,650 kilometre major highway that connected Cairns in the North with Brisbane in the South, winding its way along the Sunshine coast. The highway provides a key artery for people and freight in Australia, with efforts in a host of recent upgrades focused on improving the highway’s throughput and disconnecting local traffic where possible.
In a bid to improve the around 20 kilometres of the Bruce Highway between Caloundra Road and the Sunshine Motorway, the Queensland Government Department of Transport and Main Roads launched a planning study in 2010, with a tender for design and construction players launched in 2015.
The aim of the upgrade is to improve the climate resilience of the highway, such that it meets the local flooding resilience target of 1% AEP (annual exceedance probability; once in 100 years) for flooding events; as well as extricating local traffic from intercity traffic passing by Caloundra. The highway will also be expanded to 6-lanes to increase highway capacity and includes significant upgrades to interchanges to improve road safety.
The planning announcement sees the Fulton Hogan Seymour Whyte Joint Venture (FHSW) act as the main design and construction vendor for the project. Arup has been appointed by the FHSW to provide design and consultancy work for the further development of the project. Construction will begin late 2016 with completion scheduled for 2020.
Lee Hudson, Design Project Manager, says, “The Arup Jacobs Design Joint Venture is proud to be selected to deliver the detailed design associated with this planned major upgrade for a strategically important link of the Bruce Highway. By adopting a highly innovative design layout and incorporating a Diverging Diamond Interchange, we specifically targeted a project footprint which significantly reduced associated impacts on the Beerwah State Forest which is a critical objective of the project.”
