The 17 km (11 mi) route travels in a generally north–south direction on the city's west side.

The Government of Ontario has announced plans to build a new Highway 7 freeway bypass joining the current northern terminus of the Hanlon Expressway to the Conestoga Parkway in Kitchener.

This would bypass the congested two lane section of Highway 6 (also known as Brock Road) in Wellington County from Puslinch to Morriston which runs through several small towns where it lacks sufficient right-of-way for widening.

The Hanlon is graded and landscaped similarly to a rural freeway, with broad flat shoulders and an open median.

At the Laird Road interchange, opened in late 2013, the expressway encounters the Hanlon Creek Business Park.

Before crossing the Speed River, the expressway meets College Avenue West, an at-grade intersection at the southwest corner of Centennial Park Arena.

[6] The Hanlon Expressway crosses the Speed River as it swerves to the west and meets Wellington Street,[6] the only other interchange along the route.

North of the Wellington Road the expressway was built slightly west of what is now Silvercreek Parkway.

With the rapid suburban expansion of Guelph in the 1950s and 1960s, a revised transportation plan was conceived to handle the increasing traffic load.

[7][11] The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO) has planned to upgrade the route to a freeway since at least 1994, when an environmental assessment (EA) for the expressway north of the Speed River was completed.

Planning for this work initially began in the early 1990s with the EA for the section north of the Speed River, which resulted in the construction of the Wellington Street interchange.

[12] The following table lists the major junctions along Hanlon Expressway, as noted by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario.