Road Shock

I’ve written a few posts about roads and congestion in Cardinia Shire, but never once have I received such a response as I did when I asked the question “What is the worst maintained road in your town” recently. It took very little time to accumulate a list of almost 50 roads, with several being repeated over and over again.

And it wasn’t just one or two towns. It was towns all over the Shire, and from people of widely different backgrounds, all with the same concern – roads so poorly maintained, they are a danger not only to vehicles travelling on them, but to the lives of people driving them.

Topping the list were Doran Road in Bunyip, Main Drain Road in Koo Wee Rup and Beenak Road (East) in Gembrook. (The full list is provided toward the end of the article – please note, if I’ve missed some, it’s simply because of the overwhelming number of responses to the original posts – my apologies.)

Some background on what we’re looking at first:
Cardinia Shire, while not geographically the largest Shire in Victoria, is still pretty big. It covers an area of about 1280 square kilometres, from Nangana in the north to just past Lang Lang in the south, and from Beaconsfield in the west to almost Longwarry in the east.
There are 598 kilometres of footpaths, 689 kilometres of underground drains and over 1500 kilometres of roads the Shire is responsible for. These roads are listed in the Register of Public Roads, a 52 page document you can download from here. In conjunction with this is the Shire’s Road Management Plan, a 46 page document you can download from here.  You should read at least the section entitled “Purpose of the Plan”.
It should also be noted that agreements have been made with bounding shires and VicRoads as to the demarcation of responsibilities. The Council Budget should also be read, at least in part, in with both of the preceding documents.

The budget does include information regarding road works and maintenance, including this statement (emphasis mine):

New projects in the capital works program total $20.993m, the major projects being Deep Creek Reserve $1.865m, Lang Lang recreation facility $4.724m, James Bathe Recreation Reserve $2.025m and Comely Banks children’s facility $2.580m. In addition, $34.663m is budgeted for renewal and upgrade projects, including an additional $20.0m to be allocated to a resealing program for roads across the shire.

The Lang Lang project includes roads works.

That’s a fair whack of the budget being thrown at road works right there. So, where and how is it being spent, and how can so many roads be in such a continuous state of dangerous disrepair?

And while I’m throwing extracts around

Now, just to really blow your minds… one last extract:

$20 million borrowed for the sealing of strategic road links across the Shire in 2017/2018. Before you jump up and down about that, consider this: the cost of interest on the borrowings to upgrade and seal roads is projected to be less than the current cost of maintaining those same roads.

This is a significant commitment from council, and an indicator of how serious they are about fixing the roads as best they can

Now what I have offered here is likely a biased view simply because I’ve picked bits and pieces that stuck out (to me)… I strongly suggest you read the budget and associated documents yourself. However, in terms of straight out numbers, there’s no hiding the truth. There’s a lot of money being spent on roads, and yet, it is still not enough. Remember, the typical annual budget for roads is in the region of $6 – $7 million.

There is a process that has to occur for roads to be judged requiring attention, as there should be, for many reasons. The Road Management Plan lays out the higher level process as follows:

Where this gets a bit blurry is the intervention level, and is one of the reasons the Plan document is so long. I’m not going to regurgitate it all here, so you really do need to read through the links provided.

However, what you’ll find, when you ring our councillors, is that the most they can do is request that the road be assessed, according to the system in place. For anything more, the system will need to change, and changing any system of this size is a _very_ lengthy process.

So the issue comes down to this: change the system, and/or increase the funding. As noted earlier, changing the system is a major task, and with no guarantee the new system will be any better than the previous, irrespective of how much theorising and data-modelling is done. So the second option is to increase the funding available. Where will that money come from?

Before we can answer that, we need to look at a couple of things. First, council budget.

Read through the budget and you’ll find that certain things (like the waste management charge) do not actually cover the full cost of the service to council. All in all, there’s a heckuva lot of money moving through the shire. Now, when it comes to finances, I’m a bit of a layman, so certain things stand out to me that don’t seem to make much sense; however, taken at face value, the budget is pretty balanced, and there’s not much room to move.

So where else could the money come from? State or Federal government could contribute. In fact, Federal monies are coming the Shire’s way to improve intersections in Pakenham – not at all useful for the rural roads; but then, rural roads generally don’t have enough voters on them to warrant federal funding. A cynical but accurate take on the situation. The same holds true fairly much for state funding. Despite lobbying by councillors, gaining any sort of funding for rural road improvement is an uphill battle.

That leaves one other place: the resident.

Many of the roads on the list are classified as private, or similar, and in order for them to be sealed, residents living on properties on those roads are asked to contribute to the cost. The larger your property facing along the road, the more you’re asked to contribute. So, if we take Doran Road in Bunyip as an example, which leads into the State Park, but doesn’t actually connect anywhere else, the owners of the properties facing it would be looking at something in the order of $50,000 each to have the entire 1.5 odd kilometres sealed.

Consider this though – the cost of upgrading one section of gravel road to bitumen, for a rural road, is roughly $700,000. This is for a standard upgrade from a gravel to a sealed road with associated works (including kerb and channel, drainage improvements and footpaths).

There are about 865 kilometres of unsealed roads in the Shire – that’s about $605, 500, 000 worth – or, 100 years with the average annual budgeted amount, or ten years worth of rates leaving nothing for anything else.

Is this right, or fair? That’s for you to decide (but I would think not), but what it is, at the moment, is practical. There is no other source of funding. Council have borrowed money to seal roads (which will not be named in advance) that require sealing, to reduce the annual expenditure on maintenance, not to mention the regularity maintenance is required. Both long and short term, this is a stop gap solution.

Look for Road Shock Part II coming in the next week. More Issues and … answers?

Town	Road	Rementions
Avonsleigh	Phillip Rd	1
Avonsleigh	Wright Rd	1
Bayles	Fincks Rd
Bayles	Obriens Rd
Bayles	School Rd
Bayles	Tynong-Bayles Rd
Beaconsfield	Kenilworth Avenue	4
Beaconsfield	Rix Rd
Beaconsfield	Station St
Beaconsfield	Toomuc Valley Rd
Bunyip	14 mile Road
Bunyip	Caroline Avenue
Bunyip	Doran Road	18
Bunyip	Evans Rd	1
Bunyip	Jolley Rd
Bunyip	Murray Rd
Bunyip	Southbank Rd
Cocaktoo	Caroline Avenue	5
Cockatoo	Alexander Rd
Cockatoo	Belgrave-Gembrook Rd
Cockatoo	Dorchester Rd	1
Cockatoo	Dorchester Road
Cockatoo	Edmunds Road
Cockatoo	First Avenue	4
Cockatoo	Grant Mountain Rd
Cockatoo	Halcyon Rd
Cockatoo	Hillside Road	4
Cockatoo	Iowen Rd	1
Cockatoo	Majestic Dve
Cockatoo	Mountain Rd/Evans Rd	4
Cockatoo	Seaview Rd	3
Cockatoo	Steane St
Cockatoo	Symonds Rd	1
Dalmore	Rices Rd	1
Emerald	Glenvista Rd	1
Emerald	Lakeside Dve
Emerald	Lawson’s Rd
Emerald	Sunnyside Terrace	1
Garfield	Mont Albert Rd
Garfield	Railway Avenue
Gembrook	Beenak Road	3
Gembrook	Maisey Rd
Gembrook	Mountain Rd	1
Gembrook	Mt Eirene Rd
Gembrook	Station Rd
Gembrook	Ure Rd	3
Guys Hill	High St	1
Iona	Bunyip-Modella Rd
Koo Wee Rup	5 mile Rd
Koo Wee Rup	Boundary Drain Rd	4
Koo Wee Rup	Main Drain Road	13
Koo Wee Rup	Railway Rd	1
Lang Lang	Pioneer Rd
Lang Lang	Snobs Hill Service Rd
Lang Lang	Soldiers Rd	1
Lang Lang East	Pooles Rd	1
Maryknoll	Fogarty Road
Maryknoll	Turramurra Rd
Maryknoll	Wheeler Rd
Modella	Fallon Rd	1
Modella	Modella Rd
Mt Burnett	Mt Burnett	5
Nar Nar Goon	McCraw Rd
Officer	Brown Road
Pakenham	Dore Road	3
Pakenham	Pakenham-Koo Wee Rup Rd	1
Pakenham South	Greenhills Road	7
Pakenham South	McDonald’s Drain Road	2
Pakenham South	McGregor Road	10
Pakenham Upper	Bourkes Creek Rd
Pakenham Upper	Huxtable Rd	2
Tonimbuk	Ellis Rd
Tonimbuk	Sanders Rd	1
Tooradin	Hardy’s Rd
Tooradin	Sth Gippsland Hwy
Tynong North	Fogarty Road	1
Tynong North	Tynong Nth Rd
Yannathan	Nth Yannathan Rd