The Tullamarine Freeway (commonly referred to as The Tulla), is a major urban freeway in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, linking Melbourne Airport to the Melbourne City Centre. It carries up to 210,000 vehicles per day and is one of Australia's busiest freeways. The entire stretch of the Tullamarine Freeway bears the designation M2 (previously Metro Route 43 from 1989 to early 2018). Route The Tullamarine Freeway starts just outside Melbourne Airport, where it intersects with Sunbury Road, and runs southeast as a six-lane dual-carriageway freeway through Gladstone Park, eventually meeting with the Western Ring Road in a major interchange. Heading further south as eight lanes, it skirts the western and southern boundaries of Essendon Airport through Airport West, where it meets the Calder Freeway and widens further to ten lanes. East of the intersection with Bulla Road, it officially becomes CityLink's Western link, running south to eventually meet the West Gate Freeway in Port Melbourne: before being subsumed into CityLink in 1999, the southern end of the Tullamarine Freeway ran south through the Moonee Ponds Creek reserve to terminate just north of central Melbourne in Parkville. The section through Airport West is frequently congested due to the combination of freight traffic to/from the Hume Highway (accessed from the Western Ring Road interchange), and traffic to/from the airport. The usual peak period travel time is between 19 and 30 minutes. It is usually around 19 minutes for the majority of the daylight hours inbound, because at the southern end of CityLink there is only one lane to merge with the West Gate Freeway city-bound, hence slowing traffic over the Bolte Bridge section. However, during times of extreme congestion, including being residual due to an incident, the travel time can well exceed half an hour. History The Tullamarine Freeway is one of the oldest freeways in Melbourne. The core of the freeway through Airport West began as a deviation of Lancefield Road from the north-west of Essendon Airport, constructed during the 1945/46 financial year as a new single carriageway along the western and southern boundaries of the airport, east of the existing service road (today Matthews Avenue) and tram-way, totalling , planned to reconnect at Sunbury Road (today Bulla Road) in Essendon North. A satisfactory alignment at the eastern end could not be obtained without the demolition of numerous residences however, therefore only the section following the western boundary of the aerodrome was