Ontario Highway 537

Highway537 is a cut-off route between Highway69 and Highway17 southeast of Sudbury. It is also the main access road to the communities of Wanup and St. Cloud. The two-laned highway is paved for its entire length, as well as for the that continues as Municipal Road537. The route begins at Estaire Road (unsigned Highway 7279) within Greater Sudbury near an interchange with Highway69 (slated to become a northerly extension of Highway 400) and travels east, past the interchange and through forest, to the community of Wanup, where it intersects the Old Wanup Road. From Wanup, the highway travels eastward and northward towards Highway17, travelling through sparsely populated forest along the way. It crosses the Wanapitei River at the community of St. Cloud. Provincial maintenance of the route ends just north of a small development at Finni Road, where the road continues as Sudbury Municipal Road537 north into Wahnapitae, ending at Highway17 within the community. According to the Ministry of Transportation (MTO), on an average day, approximately 3,150vehicles travel Highway537 between the Wanapitei River and Finni Road, while approximately 570vehicles travel the highway between Estaire Road and the Wanapitei River. These represent the heaviest and least travelled sections of the route. == History ==

Highway537 was first assumed by the Department of Highways (DHO), predecessor to the modern MTO, in 1956, along with several dozen other secondary highways. It may have been provincially maintained as a development road prior to that. The Wanup–Wanapitei Road was assumed by the DHO on May9, 1956, connecting Highway69 with Highway17. It was an unpaved gravel road at the time, and remained as such until the mid-1980s; it was paved in 1984 or 1985. As part of a series of budget cuts initiated by premier Mike Harris under his Common Sense Revolution platform in 1995, numerous highways deemed to no longer be of significance to the provincial network were decommissioned and responsibility for the routes transferred to a lower level of government, a process referred to as downloading. The section of Highway537 within Nickel Centre was transferred to the Regional Municipality of Sudbury on January1, 1998. The remainder of the highway was in the unincorporated townships of Dill, Cleland, and Dryden, and had no lower government to take over maintenance of the Highway 537 route until the area was amalgamated with the region to form Greater Sudbury on January1, 2001. Following the amalgamation a further of the route, between the former Cleland–Dryden Township boundary and the former Dryden–Nickel Centre boundary, was transferred to Greater Sudbury, but the remainder of the route still retains its provincial highway designation despite now being entirely within the city limits. Highway 537 was rerouted along the new alignment, while the former routing south from Wanup was renamed Old Wanup Road. It remains part of the provincial highway system under the unsigned 7000-series designation of Highway7042. This increased the length of Highway537 by . It was completed on October 5, 2020. == Major intersections ==