EXTENDING North Lake Road as a bridge over Kwinana freeway will pave the way for a multi-million dollar cinema and entertainment district at Gateway shopping centre and create 1800 jobs says local Labor MP Fran Logan.

On Thursday the Cockburn MP and local councillors Phil Eva and Yaz Mubarakai lobbied WA Labor leader Mark McGowan, urging him to make the bridge a 2017 election pledge.

Mr Logan told his boss the WA planning department had advised Gateway’s owners a major expansion to include the cinema and other leisure business couldn’t go ahead because of chronic traffic problems.

He says an overpass will divert thousands of cars each day which are currently forced into the clogged Beeliar Drive entry to the centre and freeway.

Cr Mubarakai says an overpass will let North Lake Road operate like Roe Highway, with better traffic flow to three nearby industrial precincts.

• Labor MP Fran Logan and Cockburn councillors and Yaz Mubarakai and Phil Eva want opposition leader Mark McGowan to commit to a new bridge over the freeway.

With plans to house another 20,000 residents in the area over the next decade, the bridge will be critical if complete gridlock is to be avoided.

Cockburn council has been lobbying Main Roads for years to fund the bridge.

In May 2009 Main Roads commissioner Menno Henneveld effectively told CEO Stephen Cain not to hold his breath.

“It will be difficult to justify that significant funds be made available for this project given the number of other unfunded high priority projects that currently exist in the metropolitan area, such as grade separation of the Mirrabooka Avenue intersection on Reid Highway and the duplication of Reid Highway between Beechboro Road and Middle Swan Road,” he’d said.

There is no funding allocation for a North Lake Road bridge in the Barnett government’s forward estimates.

by STEVE GRANT