Northern Highway–Watson Street upgrades: design and staging notes for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on Roads & Infrastructure (AU)
30 Second Briefing
Road upgrades at the Northern Highway (High Street) and Watson Street intersection in Wallan will add extra lanes on the Northern Highway in both directions to cut congestion and improve safety on this key north Melbourne arterial. The jointly funded Federal–Victorian project targets a known bottleneck on the Hume Freeway approach, where turning movements and short stacking lengths currently constrain peak-hour flow. Designers and contractors can expect works focused on widening, new lane markings and signal phasing changes, with implications for pavement design, drainage adjustments and traffic management staging.
Technical Brief
- Works sit on the Northern Highway (High Street) / Watson Street junction, a key Wallan access node.
- Intersection geometry changes will require revised sight-distance checks and turning path analyses for heavy vehicles.
- Pavement widening will need tie-in detailing to existing surfacing to avoid longitudinal cracking and water ingress.
- Drainage pits and kerb profiles around the widened carriageway must be regraded to prevent ponding in turning lanes.
- Construction staging will require temporary traffic management plans with reduced approach speeds and barrier protection.
- Similar arterial intersection upgrades in Victoria increasingly bundle safety treatments with capacity works in a single contract.
Our Take
Within our 628 Infrastructure stories, Victoria features frequently for road safety works around Melbourne’s growth corridors, signalling that the State Government of Victoria is prioritising upgrades where greenfield housing and freight traffic are expanding fastest.
Wallan and Melbourne’s north sit on key freight and commuter routes linking regional Victoria to Melbourne, so intersection upgrades here typically reduce heavy-vehicle conflict points and can lower incident risk on approaches to future industrial or logistics developments.
Among the 1749 tag-matched ‘Projects’ and ‘Safety’ pieces, most Victorian items pair safety outcomes with capacity or access improvements, which usually means designers are incorporating wider cross-sections, turning lanes and signalisation rather than purely low-cost treatments.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
