JesseI had a discussion about the East-West Link the other day with someone who had noticed that it was strange that the Eastern Freeway just ends in Collingwood and doesn't connect to anything.
Melbourne built a bunch of freeways that just ended in inner city streets. This was because of successful protests and resistance to freeways plowing through the inner city of Melbourne in the 1970s.
The Eastern Freeway ends at Hoddle St in Collingwood because people in Collingwood told them to get fucked in the 1970s and it still ends at Hoddle St because in the early 2010 (the East-West Link tunnel) the community again told them to get fucked.
The East-West Link was going to be a tunnel to avoid running a freeway through the streets of inner Melbourne and avoid the resistance they'd previously encountered. But it still required bulldozing a block of houses to make way for the tunnel entrance and onramps and offramps.
I was living in Collingwood when the East-West Link works where starting and in my naive youth I thought nothing could be done to stop it. But people that knew better were already chaining themselves to core sampling equipment preventing the engineers from even doing initial soil studies and occupying the houses they'd compulsory acquired preventing them from being knocked down.
This action saved the houses, stopped the road construction, changed the government and made sure it's still a pain to drive east to west through inner Melbourne.
This is likely to be a battle that will need to be fought again in a few years as the number of cars in the city increases and they want to fix traffic by just building one more freeway connection.