The rough road ahead: Opinion

If you drive the same road often enough, eventually it begins to feel like home. Like it’s your road. You learn the corners, the overtaking opportunities, the slow spots, and even the traffic light sequences in the towns you pass through.

You also learn the rough spots, and lately there have been more and more of these showing up every day.

I spend most of my time on the road between Melbourne and Adelaide these days. It’s been twenty years since I first drove this road and, for the most part, very little has changed.

You still drive through most of the towns along the way, there is still a lot of two-way, single carriageway stretches, and a lot of the trucks carry the same names on the door.

The most obvious changes are the freeway sections between Ballarat and Beaufort and then between Beaufort and Ararat (well almost, but that’s another story), along with the roadhouses that have closed down, and the bigger change-over area at Nhill. And as it stands, there don’t seem to be any big changes coming in the near future.

It’s like the road has been forgotten for a while, and the lack of maintenance, repair and upgrades is becoming very evident.

The Western Highway is the main freight route between Melbourne and Adelaide, but also services traffic heading between Melbourne and Perth, and Melbourne and Darwin, and according to Major Road Projects Victoria “more than 6000 vehicles travel the Western Highway west of Ballarat each day, including 1500 trucks. This is expected to double by 2025”.

The expected rise in traffic will also involve much larger heavy vehicle combinations, with A doubles and B triples already becoming a familiar sight. Some operators are also looking to AB triples and B quads, with certain sections of the road already open to these vehicles under permit. Consequently, we are heading for a situation where we have twice the traffic, larger combinations, and a rapidly deteriorating road surface.

It’s fair to say that even twenty years ago the road wasn’t that great. Back then, though, it wasn’t so much the potholes that were the problem, but the uneven surface. Today, the undulations are still there, but surface itself is also breaking up badly, leaving large holes and long stretches where the wheel tracks have broken through to the sub base. This will require more than just resurfacing to repair, and begs the question as to why it has been left so long before being properly repaired?

What is also interesting, is that the newer sections of road seem to be suffering the worst, with many of the older sections holding up better. For example, in a few places where they have added an overtaking lane, the original bit of road (now the centre lane) is still the smoother option.

Maybe this has something to do with different road making techniques, the use of more environmentally friendly materials, or it could simply be budget related. Either way, the result is a much shorter service life in terms of the road surface.

Throughout this winter, the situation has gotten rapidly worse. At the worst stage, sections of the freeway around Trawalla had lane closures in place, as the road surface had basically disintegrated. This meant that all the traffic was forced into one lane, which then also disintegrated under the load.

Many of the worst sections have since been repaired, but the repairs are now also failing after only a short time. Along the whole length of the road, from Melton to the South Australia border, there are patches of road that are going the same way. Maintenance on these sections seems to be down to a couple of blokes filling in potholes one shovel-full at a time.

The situation is so bad, that regular users of the road often straddle the fog line or the centre line to avoid the worst of the holes. On many of the overtaking lanes they will use the right lane (if the traffic conditions allow), as these are generally smoother. Technically speaking, all of these tactics are illegal, but in terms of minimising damage and maintenance on your vehicle, they are totally understandable.

So how do we fix the issue? It would seem the problem has moved beyond the surface integrity, and now the base of the road is suffering severely. I’m no road engineer, but putting a layer of emulsion and stone down to seal the surface doesn’t make sense if the problem lies beneath.

It would seem that now the process needs to start literally from the ground up, and that costs money. Which leads me to my next point.

Every road user in the country pays for the privilege of having good, safe roads to drive on. With every litre of fuel we put in the tank, whatever vehicle we drive, we contribute money to the Government that should be used to build and maintain the highways and freeways around the country.

We also pay for registration, which is mandatory if you want to operate your vehicle on the road. A large portion of this money goes to the respective state Governments, with the idea being that it goes back into road funding. Over recent years, where that money is spent seems to be dictated by governments (not on a needs basis) and used to facilitate election promises in the areas where they most need votes.

In fact, you may recall a few years back when the Victorian Government spent billions of dollars getting out of a road building contract just to buy votes. Yep, they spent the money to NOT build a road. A road that would have had benefits for thousands of road users every day, but apparently not the voters in the area.

This not only put a hole in the roads budget, but left road users with no return on their investment. It makes no sense.

If road users are expected to pay for the roads, surely there is a minimum standard of road that we can expect to be provided with? We are also required to maintain our vehicles to a minimum standard, with significant penalties handed down if we don’t. Maintaining your vehicle to a roadworthy standard is only getting more difficult, due to the condition of roads.

So here we are in a position where we are seemingly not getting what we paid for, and being penalised for the damage caused to our vehicles by sub-standard roads. Add to this the fact that this a workplace for a considerable number of people, and you wonder how long it can be overlooked.

At what point do we, as an industry and as tax payers, demand some action be taken outside of the cities to rectify the situation? Even if it started today, the work to fix our roads would take years. The longer we wait, the more difficult the job becomes, and the longer it will take. It will also become more expensive, and it’ll be us who are footing the bill.

It's about time we hit the landlord up to do a bit of work around our second home, and workplace.