The $940m bypass clears the highway north of Milton. Burrill Lake still rates F.

The environmental impact statement for the Milton Ulladulla bypass, a 12 kilometre road west of both town centres from Little Forest to Burrill Lake, is on exhibition on the NSW Planning Portal until midnight on Monday 19 October 2026. Its traffic chapter answers the question the towns have been asking since the bypass was announced: what does the $940 million the Australian and NSW governments have committed actually buy? North of Milton, where the highway meets the town, the forecast is 4,600 vehicles a day in 2031 instead of 13,100, a cut of almost two thirds. Through the town centres the cut is far smaller: about 27 per cent north of Bishop Drive and 15 per cent south of it. And south of Canberra Crescent, where the bypass rejoins the highway at Burrill Lake, the same table forecasts 2,700 more vehicles a day, not fewer.

That one row is the story of this EIS. The bypass does what a bypass does, and does it well, for the northern approach and the Milton and Ulladulla main streets. It then hands the traffic back to the highway at Burrill Lake, and the EIS's own intersection tables show the roundabouts there failing within a decade of opening.

What the trip looks like

The modelled run is the Princes Highway between Lake Conjola Entrance Road and Wheelbarrow Road, roughly the whole stretch the bypass replaces. At the holiday peak today that takes 32 minutes northbound and 35 southbound in the EIS's 2025 base model. Without the bypass the same run is forecast at an hour and two minutes northbound in 2031, and an hour and 44 minutes southbound in 2041. By 2051 the chapter does not give a figure: it says the holiday traffic would exceed the capacity of the road network and produce system-wide gridlock.

With the bypass, the same run on the new road takes 14 and a half minutes each way in 2031, and the old highway through the towns drops to 22 to 24 minutes. The EIS's headline savings, about 48 minutes northbound and 39 southbound at the 2031 holiday peak, and 58 minutes and an hour and 28 minutes in 2041, are measured against that no-bypass future, not against today. Measured against today's 32 minutes, the 2031 bypass trip is about 17 minutes quicker. On an ordinary weekday the saving is eight to nine minutes in the morning peak. The bypass's real product is the school holidays. A commuter gets back less than ten minutes.

Where the traffic goes

Table 8-8 of the traffic chapter gives two-way daily volumes for each section of the existing highway with and without the project. Four of the five sections fall. One rises.

The rise is 22 per cent in 2031 and holds through the model: 2,900 more vehicles a day in 2041 and 3,000 more in 2051. The chapter does not discuss the row. The nearest explanation it offers is for a different effect: the bypass is expected to reduce the diversion of traffic onto local roads such as Wheelbarrow Road and Woodstock Road by restoring through-traffic to the state road network. Our reading is that traffic brought back onto the state road has to leave it somewhere, and the southern roundabout at Canberra Crescent is where it does. Local roads are not spared everywhere either: Green Street, which passes under the bypass at the central connection, goes from 2,500 vehicles a day to 6,500 in 2031.

Burrill Lake: the part the bypass does not fix

The chapter grades 22 intersections on the standard level-of-service scale, A to F, where D means Operating near capacity and F means Unsatisfactory and requires additional capacity, an average wait of more than 70 seconds a vehicle. Table 8-12 gives the grades for the holiday peak, 10.45am to 11.45am. These are the rows for the southern end of the project and for the one Milton intersection that never recovers.

Holiday-peak level of service at Princes Highway intersections, EIS Chapter 8, Table 8-12. A dash is an intersection not yet built.

Intersection	2025	2031 without	2031 with	2041 with	2051 with
Northern connection roundabout (new)	-	-	D	F	E
Canberra Crescent (the southern connection)	B	F	B	B	C
Princess Avenue South / McDonald Parade, Burrill Lake	B	F	D	F	F
Balmoral Road / Dolphin Point Road	B	F	F	F	F
Dolphin Point Road / Wallaroy Drive	C	F	C	F	F
Ilett Street, Milton	F	F	D	F	F

Read across the Burrill Lake rows. The three roundabouts south of the new connection work today, at B, B and C. Without the bypass they all fail by 2031, and the EIS is right that doing nothing is worse. With the bypass, in its opening years, two of the three are back to acceptable and Balmoral Road is already at F. By 2041 all three are at F, and they stay there. The bypass does not fix Burrill Lake. On the EIS's own table it buys the roundabouts about ten years, and the new northern connection roundabout itself is forecast at F in 2041.

The chapter's summary of that table is gentler than the table. It says the improved network would be able to accommodate holiday peak demand through to 2051, with most intersections operating at LOS D or better, except for the existing Princes Highway intersections with Balmoral Road and Dolphin Point Road. Count the 2051 with-project column and six intersections are at F: the two the sentence names, plus Princess Avenue South at Burrill Lake and Ilett Street, Golf Avenue and St Vincent Street in the towns. The weekday afternoon table is similar at its worst: in 2051 with the bypass, Ilett Street, Village Drive and Croobyar Road are all at F.

The gap matters because of how the project is being sold back to the people who raised it. The EIS Summary records the community's concerns about traffic bottlenecks shifting south to Burrill Lake and requests for the bypass to extend south to address congestion at Burrill Lake and Lake Tabourie among the themes of earlier consultation (Table S-1, page viii). The justification chapter's reply is that The project addresses bottleneck concerns at Burrill Lake and Canberra Crescent by providing an alternative route that diverts regional through-traffic away from these constrained sections of the existing highway (Chapter 24, page 24-7). In our view that sentence is true of Canberra Crescent, which the bypass's own roundabout replaces, and not of Burrill Lake, where the same document forecasts more traffic and three failed roundabouts. The honest version is that the bypass ends at Burrill Lake and the queue moves there with it. That is a reasonable engineering choice for a $940 million project. It is not the same as addressing the concern, and a submission is entitled to ask what is planned for those three roundabouts, and when.

Where the FAQ and the EIS disagree

Transport for NSW's exhibition FAQ says the bypass removes up to 8,500 vehicles per day from the Princes Highway, marking a 62 per cent reduction in traffic (FAQ, page 8). The 8,500 is the north-of-Milton row of Table 8-8 in 2031, and 8,500 out of 13,100 is 65 per cent, which is the figure the EIS Summary and the traffic chapter both use. No pairing of the north-of-Milton figures in Table 8-8 gives 62, and the FAQ does not say how it was calculated. The reduction also applies to that one section: through the town centres the cut is 15 to 27 per cent, and south of Canberra Crescent traffic goes up.

The FAQ lists two vegetated land bridges and eight wildlife gantries for fauna crossing the road (page 7). The EIS Summary proposes two land bridges, six fauna gantries, four dedicated fauna underpasses, as well as 10 combined structures (page x). The Summary also gives the state government land to be acquired as 33 hectares, where the project description chapter's key-features table says 35 hectares. And the Summary disagrees with itself on one line: page v puts the cut on the highway approaching Ulladulla from the south at 15 per cent, page ix at 19 per cent. Table 8-8 supports 19: the 15 is the section south of Bishop Drive. None of these is large. Together they are a reason to read the chapters, not the FAQ, before writing a submission.

Safety and trucks

The safety case is the strongest part of the document and it is not in dispute. The chapter counts a total of 144 crashes, including five fatal and 16 serious injury crashes in the study area between 2020 and 2024, and says About 23 per cent of crashes involved heavy vehicles (page 8-16). The bypass would be a B-Double route, and the EIS forecasts 780 fewer heavy vehicles a day on the existing highway between the northern and central connections in 2031, rising to 1,050 by 2051, and up to 640 fewer between Canberra Crescent and Bishop Drive. Trucks that have no business in Milton or Ulladulla leave the main streets. That is a plain good.

How to have your say, and by when

Submissions go to the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure through the project's Planning Portal page (application SSI-76796211), and close at midnight on Monday 19 October 2026. Transport for NSW will answer questions but says we cannot accept submissions (project page). You need a Planning Portal account, your name and address, whether you support, object or are commenting, your reasons, and a declaration of any reportable political donations in the last two years. Submissions are published in full; you can have your name withheld. Help with the portal is on 1300 305 695.

On what is open to change, the FAQ is candid: While we are not seeking further feedback on the bypass corridor, feedback is welcome on the social, environmental and economic impacts of the bypass and its design features (page 2). The route is settled. The roundabouts, the crossings and the conditions are not.

Three drop-in sessions remain, per the September community update: Ulladulla Harbour markets on Sunday 11 October, 8am to 1pm; Milton Memorial Park on Tuesday 13 October, 12pm to 4.30pm; and the Ulladulla Civic Centre upper auditorium on Wednesday 14 October, 2pm to 4pm and 5pm to 7pm. A printed EIS is at Ulladulla Library and Information Centre, 81B Princes Highway.

After exhibition, Transport expects a Response to Submissions report in early to mid 2027, planning approval and a design-and-construct contract around late 2027, and construction from around late 2028. The community update's timeline ends at 2032, project completion and open to traffic; the FAQ says We anticipate construction will start in 2028 and is likely to take four years to complete (page 8). All of those dates are marked as subject to change.

If you are writing one, four questions drawn from the tables above are worth putting: what is planned for the three Burrill Lake and Dolphin Point roundabouts the EIS forecasts at F from 2041, and when; how the FAQ's 62 per cent was calculated; whether the fauna gantries number six or eight; and what the central connection means for the people on Green Street, whose traffic the model more than doubles.