New South Wales
Photo Gallery

Welcome to the New South Wales Road Photo Gallery.

NSW covers an area of 800 642 square kilometres on the eastern part of Australia, and The Roads and Traffic Authority manages 17 623 km of State Roads including 3105 km of National Highways. This includes facilities such as traffic lights, roundabouts, signs and linemarking. It also manages nearly 3000 km of Regional Roads and Local Roads in the unincorporated area of NSW where there are no Local Councils, plus they look after 4787 bridges, major culverts and tunnels and nine vehicular ferries. (Information courtesy of RTA and Geoscience Australia)

Image © Michael Gill

In New South Wales, as is the case with all the other states in Australia, the roads are classified into different categories, and are also numbered for maintenance purposes and also navigation purposes.

According to the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority's Road Occupancy Manual, Roads in NSW are divided into three types:

Road Type (Classification): Description: Managed By:
Arterial Roads (State roads) High traffic volume roads; highways, freeways, motorways and main roads managed by the RTA. The RTA.
Sub–arterial roads (Regional roads) These are major connector roads between state roads. They have significant traffic capacity whilst lower than those of arterial roads. Shared responsibility between RTA and local Councils.
Local roads (Unclassified) These are other minor roads managed by local Councils. Usually local Council, but may be joint responsibility.

Route Numbering is designed to aid motorists navigate, using route shields as guidance. NSW currently uses a heirarchical system for route marking. In the metropoliain area of Sydney, Metroads are the most important arterial roads, while in rural areas the National Highways and National Routes are the major highways. State Routes are the secondary ways of travel and other important urban routes that the Metroads dont cover, while Tourist Drives provide links from the State, National or Metroad routes to tourist areas / attractions.

NSW will be converting to the alpha-numeric style of route marking in the near future, which has already been done in parts of Victoria and Queensland, plus across SA and Tasmania. The timing of the conversion is unknown, however the first official implementation of an alphanumeric route in NSW is the Westlink M7 Motorway back in 2005.

To check out the routes used in NSW and photos of them, click on one of the section names below:

National Highways   Tourist Drives
National Routes   Alphanumeric Routes
State Routes   Decommissioned Routes  
Metroads   Unnumbered Routes