Huon Highway Corridor Strategy – Kingston to Southport

The Huon Highway is an important road connecting community, industry and visitors to the Huon Valley with Hobart and delivering produce from the region to the major air and sea ports in Tasmania.

The Huon Highway from Kingston to Huonville is a Category 2 Major Regional Road.  The purpose of Category 2 roads is to link major production areas to the Category 1 roads such as the Southern Outlet. It passes through both the Kingborough and Huon Valley Council local government areas.

Recently there has been an increase in successful tourism businesses along the Huon Highway, and more mixing of tourist and local traffic moving at a range of speeds. With this increase in road traffic there has been an increase in traffic incidents.

The Huon Highway from Huonville to Dover is a Category 3 Regional Access Road and is important to regional and local communities and economies. South of Dover, the Highway is a Category 4 Road, allowing safe travel between towns, major tourist destinations and industrial areas. The corridor carries heavy freight vehicles, school buses and tourist traffic as well as commuters.

We have released a summary report of the feedback following community consultation in July and August of 2021.

The feedback will be used to inform development of the corridor strategy, and to prioritise projects for our 10-Year Strategic Action Plan for the highway.

Key themes raised during the consultation included pedestrian and bus stop safety, traffic volumes, heavy vehicle traffic, parking, speed limits, visibility, turning lanes and road width.

The five intersections that drew the most comments on Social Pinpoint were Mountain River Road at Grove, Leslie Road at Kingston, Krauses Road and Huon Road at Lower Longley, Wilmot Road/Sale Street at Huonville.

The consultation included individual meetings, workshops and public consultation using an interactive map on Social Pinpoint, where people could leave comments.

The next step will be to develop a prioritised list of road improvement projects that will improve safety and travel time reliability in the short term and plan for expected future needs.

You can download the Huon Highway Corridor Strategy Consultation and Feedback Findings Summary as a PDF below.

Huon Highway Corridor Strategy - Consultation and Feedback Findings Summary.

The aim of the Huon Highway Corridor Strategy – Kingston to Southport is to provide a list of road improvement projects over the next 30 years.

The key objectives are to identify:

• how functional the road is
• the level of service it provides for different types of transport and the transport demand
• locations for potential upgrades.

We will develop a plan that will include a prioritised list of upgrade projects. The list will include projects that address high risk issues to be upgraded in the short term, and other upgrade opportunities that could be put forward for future funding allocations in the medium and long term.

The Huon Highway Corridor Strategy is made up of two sections:

1. Huon Highway: Kingston to Huonville
2. Huon Highway: Huonville to Southport.

The strategy will include a review the list of projects from the 2012/13 Huon Highway Corridor Study, which looked at the highway between Huonville and Southport. We will take your feedback on board to help us understand any new issues or changes since the previous study.

The Huon Highway Corridor Strategy will look at the capacity and safety features of the road between Kingston and Southport.

The strategy will deliver a prioritised list of road improvement projects, to meet the expected need of the road over the next 30 years.

A key priority of this project is to identify areas with high crash rates that could be upgraded as a priority for the short term. Medium and long term upgrade improvement options will address changes that are expected in the future.

The benefits of the future upgrades through this corridor are improved safety, reliability and efficiency.

We have been progressively preparing corridor strategies for State roads across Tasmania to create consistency in how the State Road Network is planned and managed.

Corridor strategies make planning and investment decisions transparent to the community, councils and other key stakeholders. By reviewing a variety of issues, the corridor strategy identifies:

• ways to improve and encourage better transport and economic opportunities in the South of Tasmania
• current and future challenges in meeting corridor specific objectives
• key transport demands likely to be placed on the corridor over the next 30 years
• high, medium and low priorities and actions to improve the corridor.

The strategy area is shown below. The study area includes the Huon Highway between Kingston and Southport, including Scotts Road.

The Huon Highway through the Huonville central business district (Orchard Avenue to Huon River Bridge) is excluded.

For further information about the project, please email: info@stategrowth.tas.gov.au