Vic Roads should be embarrassed

Having driven in all states of Australia other than NT I think Vic Roads ought to be embarrassed at the state of the roads in Victoria compared to those other states. I'm not talking about about suburban roads and feeder roads because while roads corporations in different states are no doubt responsible for different things in Vic our roads corporation is only responsible for highways and major roads, (local councils are responsible for the rest) and it's these roads that are a disgrace.

Having recently traveled across the Nullabor to Perth it's not hard to see when you cross the border into Victoria, the roads become lumpy, patchy and in some cases pot holed. When are Vic Roads going to learn that patching a patch in the road surface 4 times is not going to fix a road. In many cases the only way to fix it properly is to start from scratch, sure it will inconvenience roads users for a while as the road is fixed but its better than having to inconvenience them every day and then really annoy them when it's patched for the 15th time in a year.

The highway from Mildura to Bendigo is the roughest made roads I traveled in the entire trip to Perth and back and in some cases rivals the dirt roads I traveled. The constant up and down felt like driving over corrugated iron, then added to the great road surface every few ks you come upon patches that rose 3 inches higher than the road surface around it only to sink away the same 3 inches where a pot hole was forming and these are the holes that were recently fixed.

All states have bad roads and all states have roads corporations taking money for nothing which sucks but Vic Roads instead of taking all our licensing fees, rego fees and other fines you can get away with and sticking them into a cosy little slush fund for your end of year parties and over paid fat arsed executives start using it to make our roads at least closely resemble those in other states.

/end rant

KraftyPg said:

a cosy little slush fund for your end of year parties and over paid fat arsed executives start using it to make our roads at least closely resemble those in other states.

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And needless logo changes, don't forget those!

I work at a local council over the summer and on total fire ban days I can't drive my tractor so I occasionally wind up with the asphalt crew. The crew is not supposed to patch anything in the shire bigger than a kitchen table or it's VicRoads' responsibility. There's one spot on a main road between two towns that is falling to bits and council keep doing small hotmix patches and coldmix patches and spray sealing it to try to make it hold together. It's a 100km/h road and every time it rains another part of the road slumps and breaks up making a great obstacle course. VicRoads keep coming out and saying "Hmm. Looks alright." and leaving. WTF?

I know there shocking, pocketing money and doing the bare minimum to keep the roads up to spec. This one piece of road in particular that leads to my parents farm is absolutely F*cked, i have to do 30km/h in my nav so the bumps dont make me fly out the windscreen, there not the tiny corrugated bumps but the long ones, so if you were doing 100km/h (the speed limit) your car is almost airborn 4 times on this road and bouncing like crazy every other bump.

Pro-Nav2.7TDi said:

And needless logo changes, don't forget those!

I work at a local council over the summer and on total fire ban days I can't drive my tractor so I occasionally wind up with the asphalt crew. The crew is not supposed to patch anything in the shire bigger than a kitchen table or it's VicRoads' responsibility. There's one spot on a main road between two towns that is falling to bits and council keep doing small hotmix patches and coldmix patches and spray sealing it to try to make it hold together. It's a 100km/h road and every time it rains another part of the road slumps and breaks up making a great obstacle course. VicRoads keep coming out and saying "Hmm. Looks alright." and leaving. WTF?

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I used to work for the council down here before amalgamation and we had the same issue. Being the council we'd get all the calls from residents telling us how bad the roads were and because I worked in the survey department it was up to us to check the damage and report it to VR but the problem we had was that because the general public weren't the ones dealing with VR VR could ignore the complaints as local government were taking them all.

VR even paid my council to send me out and put traffic counters on the highways leading into town so they could get accurate Easter holiday figures of cars using the highway. I couldn't believe that a roads corporation didn't have the facilities to do their own traffic surveys, in this day and age of privatization I'd believe it but this was before all that happened.

SOLID D22 said:

I know there shocking, pocketing money and doing the bare minimum to keep the roads up to spec. This one piece of road in particular that leads to my parents farm is absolutely F*cked, i have to do 30km/h in my nav so the bumps dont make me fly out the windscreen, there not the tiny corrugated bumps but the long ones, so if you were doing 100km/h (the speed limit) your car is almost airborn 4 times on this road and bouncing like crazy every other bump.

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The ones down the Calder from Mildura are more like riding on the big dipper as a kid, they aren't ruts like on dirt but its just constant up and down up and down and in most places it's a 110k zone.

We discovered some of those roads during our Christmas trip (Penshurst-Hamilton-Warracknabeal-Mildura). The caravan didn't like it much and neither did we - if we backed off the pace a little, the bumps got closer together to ensure that "thou shalt heave now" feeling never left us for too long.

Overall, though, I thought Vic's roads left NSW roads for dead, but then I've been around Dungog Shire council roads a bit and they don't know how to apply road surface in one go at all, they have to contract an expert in and for the last 30 years, the only available expert for their council has been on sabbatical stuffing goats in a monastery in Nepal.

I'm sure he'll be back soon and will ensure that the roads are upgraded to at least be satisfactory for goats to use.

In another embarrassment for Vic Roads it was reported yesterday that something like 10 staff have been sacked or moved into other areas because they've been accessing customers private information.

Apparently it's been going on for quite a number of years now but it's good to see just what we are paying some of these idiots to do during working hours. Although the biggest surprise to me is that most of them appear to be office plebs, when I used to be Systems Admin at DSS (before they were Centerlink) it was nearly always the upper echelon managers and stuff getting caught accessing customer data not the plebs.

At my local vic roads if you try call them or make the effort and go there, your always waiting minimum of 30mins.

That appears to be because they are too busy looking up personal information and selling it to the highest bidder. You have to give them a chance this sort of stuff even in the digital age isn't instant.