SH1 Mosgiel to Balclutha

Making the road safer

We’re investigating ways to make State Highway 1 between Mosgiel and Balclutha safer.

SH1 is the main link between Dunedin and Southland. It’s an important road for freight and is used by a lot of tourists. This 63km section of SH1 starts at the end of the Southern Motorway at Mosgiel, South of Dunedin, and connects several small communities.

Parts of this stretch of road are long and straight, while other sections are more rolling and winding. Drivers can be caught by unexpected corners or bends, and this has led to crashes.

Between 2006 and 2015, 12 people were killed and 66 were seriously injured in crashes on this stretch of road. Many of these crashes happened when drivers ran off the road and hit trees or power poles. There have also been head-on crashes.

We want to make changes so that simple mistakes don’t result in someone dying or being seriously injured.

What we are doing

There are ways we can make this road safer and help prevent more crashes from happening.  We are considering:

• widening the shoulders where possible in high-risk sections to give drivers more room to recover if they lose control
• putting in flexible roadside safety barriers to stop drivers running off the road
• widening the centreline or putting in flexible median safety barriers (where driveways or access roads are not affected) to keep vehicles apart and prevent head-on crashes