From The Age, December 6, 2012, by Adam Carey

A Queensland company that overestimated the traffic on Brisbane’s financially failed airport toll road has been hired to predict the traffic on Melbourne’s proposed $10 billion east-west toll road.

Queensland-based Veitch Lister Consulting predicted in July that Brisbane’s Airport Link M7 would attract 120,000 vehicles a day toll-free when opened, taper off to 85,000 vehicles within six months and eventually sink to 60,000 vehicles a day.

But the road, which opened four months ago, carried just 53,000 vehicles a day last month, less than two-thirds Veitch Lister’s forecast.

Veitch Lister was not employed by the operator, BrisConnections, to do the modelling but did it independently. Its forecasts eclipsed BrisConnections’ own, which predicted that the road would gradually ramp up to 160,000 vehicles a day.

Victorian Greens leader Greg Barber said the toll road’s poor results – which last month forced BrisConnections into a trading halt on the stock exchange after its shares hit 0.04 cents – called into question the Victorian government’s assertion that the east-west link would carry up to 100,000 vehicles a day. ”The east-west tunnel will end up being a bigger white elephant than the north-south water pipeline,” he said. Continue Reading…