Highway 6 (Ontario)

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Ontario provincial highway 6 is one of the King's Highways in the province of Ontario, Canada. It covers some 480 km (300 miles), from Port Dover on Lake Erie, through Hamilton, Guelph, Owen Sound and Tobermory.

At Tobermory, the Chi-Cheemaun ferry crosses Lake Huron, docking at South Baymouth. Highway 6 resumes at South Baymouth and traverses Manitoulin Island to Little Current, where it crosses the north channel of Lake Huron via the Little Current Swing Bridge. Once on the mainland, the highway continues to north of Espanola, where it ends at the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 17) in Baldwin Township.

Until the 1980s, Highway 6 on Manitoulin Island and northward towards Espanola was known as Ontario provincial highway 68.

In Guelph, it travels the full length of the Hanlon Parkway, a divided highway.

Between Guelph and Hamilton, Highway 6 is infamous for its high accident rate. The main reason for this high accident rate, particularly the high rate of head-on collisions, is the lack of a median or divider, which means cars often veer into oncoming traffic during bad weather. Though most of the route is five lanes — two travel lanes in each direction, plus one centre lane for left turns — the section in Wellington County from Puslinch to Morriston remains two lanes, and suffers from significant congestion. A new alignment, connecting to the Hanlon Parkway at Highway 401, is proposed to bypass this troubled section. High travel speeds in the five-lane section — typical flow varies between 100 km/h (65 mph) and 120 km/h (75 mph) where the speed limit is just 80 km/h (50 mph) — lead to a high level of police enforcement on this route.

In Hamilton, Highway 6 now uses a new alignment from Highway 403 to south of the Hamilton Airport, connecting with the southerly leg to Caledonia and Port Dover. The new alignment opened as an undivided two-lane freeway; it is expected to expand to a full 4-lane divided highway, and to extend to past Caledonia, by some time in the 2010s.

Previous to the completion of this new Highway 6, the highway had been routed via Upper James Avenue.