The Gipps Street Elevated Walkway is a 220-metre-long elevated shared bicycle and pedestrian pathway, traversing a 10-metre level difference between the bank of the Birrarung – Yarra River and the inner-urban streets of Abbotsford above.

The project forms part of Melbourne’s Capital City Trail, a metropolitan-scale recreational route which follows the banks of the Birrarung – Yarra, winding through many of the city’s beautiful parks and network of streets of the inner northern suburbs. The route connects multiple shared paths through a variety of landscapes.

Historically, a steep concrete stairway at Gipps Street in Abbotsford presented a major barrier for cyclists, families with prams, and anyone with accessibility needs. The elevated walkway, which replaces that stairway, removes that obstacle, making the trail safer, smoother, and more inclusive for all users. It also strengthens how people move across the river and experience nature on the city’s edge.

The design protects existing native trees and restores the formerly degraded river embankment with new native and indigenous planting, and modest streetscape improvements at the Gipps Street connection, creating a safer, more welcoming arrival to the river corridor.

The elevated walkway comprises a steel superstructure supporting a semi-transparent fibre-reinforced polymer deck. Further transparency is provided via the use of stainless steel tensile mesh as a fall protection balustrade, providing users with a strong sense of visual connection to the riparian landscape through which the walkway traverses. This lightweight materiality also ensures that the structure is visually recessive in its setting, allowing the riverine landscape to be the hero.

Traversing the walkway is an immersive experience, providing users the opportunity to see and hear the river, touch and smell the Eucalyptus canopy vegetation, and be surrounded by the natural landscape. The organic form of the walkway takes subtle cues from the meandering course of the adjacent river and is in part inspired by local fauna, notably the Tiger Snake (Notechis scutatus), which is commonly seen along the banks of the river.

The complex geometry of the design was predicated by the need to navigate a challenging set of site-related constraints, including a 45-degree slope, flood levels of up to 8 metres above the river bank, an existing bridge over the river (which the walkway both passes under at its mid-point and connects to at its upper end), and the need to comply with maximum gradients determined by legislated universal design standards.

Pragmatically, the design of the walkway conforms with all applicable standards and regulatory requirements relating to universal access, ensuring that it is safe and comfortable for use by all. The project is the result of more than 18 years of advocacy by bicycle user groups who have championed the need to complete this long-standing ‘missing link’ in the recreational trail network.

Following 10 years of collaborative design, engagement, documentation, and construction, the new elevated walkway was opened to the public in December 2025 and has quickly become a highly used and valued public asset.

Capital City Trail, Yarra River, Abbotsford, Victoria, 3067, Australia