The Western Harbour Crossing is a dual 3-lane immersed tube tunnel in Hong Kong. It is the third road tunnel to cross Victoria Harbour, linking the newly reclaimed land in Yau Ma Tei on Kowloon West with Sai Ying Pun on Hong Kong Island. It was constructed by the Western Harbour Tunnel Company Limited on a 30-year franchise build-operate-transfer model proposed by the Government.Western Harbour Crossing is the first three-lane road tunnel in Asia to be constructed using submerged pipe, and is the newest of the three Victoria Harbour road tunnels. It is part of the Airport Core Programme which was a comprehensive set of infrastructure projects associated with the airport at Chek Lap Kok. The tunnel carries on the Route 3 designation from the West Kowloon Highway, and connects to Route 4 on Hong Kong Island.The tunnel projectBackgroundBy the early 1980s, the Cross-Harbour Tunnel (CHT) was already stretched beyond its designed capacity of 80,000 vehicle-trips daily, with in excess of 120,000. Furthermore, on the basis of population growth projected from 5.125m in 1981 to 6.34m in 2001, the Second Comprehensive Transport Study (CTS-2) in the late 1980s forecast an explosion in the number of cross-harbour trips - individual person trips would increase by 86% from 1.4m to 2.6m, and goods vehicle trips by 129% from 34,000 to 78,000 by 2001.