Site

This is just a fun little site to indicate if the Pacific Highway in Australia has been fully upgraded yet.

The purpose of this site is to inform, to entertain, and to give the government oh so teeny tiny a nudge in getting on with the job.

This site is an independent work, and is not affiliated in any way with the NSW government, the Australian government, or any other official body.

No responsibility is taken for the accuracy of information on this site. A reasonable attempt has been made to provide correct facts, and to cite all sources.

Site by GreenAsh.

Code on GitHub, contributions welcome.

Design by d-asnaghi and HTML5 UP.

Background image: Old Pacific Highway (near Calga / Mount White), from Wikimedia Commons.

Logo: NSW alphanumeric route A1, from Wikimedia Commons.

Site built with Hugo. Hosted on Netlify.

Countdown code borrowed from death-to-ie11.

Highway

The date in the “ETA” countdown is 1 Jan 2030. That’s an arbitrary target date for completion of the M1 Pacific Motorway extension to Raymond Terrace (aka Hexham bypass), for which no construction dates have currently been announced. That will probably be the final step in upgrading the whole highway. That target date is fairly optimistic.

The date in the “already waited” timer is 19 Mar 1989. That was the day that the Wahroonga to Berowra section of the F3 Freeway officially opened, and was therefore the first time that there was a motorway grade road north out of metropolitan Sydney.

Coincidentally, the Kempsey bus crash happened that same year, on 22 Dec 1989. Both of those events made the people of NSW more anxious than ever for an upgraded highway.

“Pacific Highway”, for the purposes of this site, means the contiguous road route along the east coast of Australia, from the centre of Sydney to the centre of Brisbane.

“Upgraded”, for the purposes of this site, means uninterrupted dual carriageway, with no traffic lights or roundabouts, along the entire route.

On 17 Dec 2020, with the completion of the Woolgoolga to Ballina upgrade, the NSW and Australian governments announced that the Pacific Highway upgrade is finished. That’s not true! The recent improvements are significant and laudable; however, the job’s not done.

Even with the government’s cop-out re-definition of Pacific Highway as “from Hexham to the Queensland border” (and in practice “from Hexham” is lamely interpreted as “from Raymond Terrace”), it’s not done. The Coffs Harbour bypass still needs to be built, and that has only just gotten past the planning stage. It currently has a target completion date of 2027.

The Hume Highway – that is, the contiguous road route from the centre of Melbourne to the centre of Sydney – finished getting upgraded in 2013. With the completion of Sydney’s NorthConnex motorway in Oct 2020, it was pointed out that once the Coffs Harbour and Hexham bypasses are eventually complete, “drivers will not encounter a single traffic light from Geelong to Gympie”.

We’ll get there one day!