Bellarine Highway begins at the intersection of Latrobe Terrace and McKillop Street on the western edge of central Geelong. As McKillop Street, it runs east as a four-lane, dual-carriageway road through Geelong, where it eventually intersects with and changes its name to Ormond Road, running south-east until the intersection with Boundary Road on the eastern edge of central Geelong. It then changes its name to Bellarine Highway in its own right and progressively heads south-east through Leopold. It eventually meets Grubb Road in Wallington, where it narrows to a dual-lane, single-carriageway road past Point Lonsdale. The highway eventually ends at Wharf Street East, Queenscliff, where it meets the Searoad Ferries passenger and motor vehicle ferry which operates across Port Phillip Bay to Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula.
History
The passing of the Country Roads Act of 1912[5] through the Parliament of Victoria provided for the establishment of the Country Roads Board (later VicRoads) and their ability to declare Main Roads, taking responsibility for the management, construction and care of the state's major roads from local municipalities. Geelong-Queenscliff Road from Geelong to Queenscliff was declared a Main Road on 16 March 1914.[2]
The passing of the Highways and Vehicles Act of 1924[6] provided for the declaration of State Highways, roads two-thirds financed by the state government through the Country Roads Board. Bellarine Highway was declared a State Highway in the 1947/48 financial year,[3] from Geelong to Queenscliff (for a total of 20 miles), subsuming the original declaration of Geelong-Queenscliff Road as a Main Road. It was named after the Bellarine Peninsula.
Bellarine Highway was signed as State Route 91 between Geelong and Queenscliff in 1986;[7] with Victoria's conversion to the newer alphanumeric system in the late 1990s, this was replaced by route B110, which continues on the other side of the bay at Sorrento to run along Point Nepean Road until Mornington. The Geelong end of the highway originally ran along Ryrie Street in the Geelong city centre, but was relocated a number of blocks south to McKillop Street to remove heavy trucks from the shopping district in October 1997.[8]
The passing of the Road Management Act 2004[9] granted the responsibility of overall management and development of Victoria's major arterial roads to VicRoads: in 2006, VicRoads re-declared the road as Bellarine Highway (Arterial #6730), beginning at Latrobe Terrace at Geelong and ending at the end of the Bellarine Peninsula in Queenscliff.[4]
^State Government of Victoria. "Road Management Act 2004"(PDF). Government of Victoria. Archived(PDF) from the original on 18 October 2021. Retrieved 19 October 2021.
