Drivers are suffering shredded tyres, smashed gearboxes and other vehicle damage from monster potholes, and are lashing out over what they say is a lack of maintenance leaving Victoria’s roads in a dangerous state.
Janine Stembridge said her Honda Civic was left so damaged after hitting a patch of deep potholes in the Macedon Ranges that she had to buy another car. It would have cost $10,000 to repair the transmission, Stembridge said.
Janine Stembridge’s car was damaged by driving on potholes around Woodend. Credit: Eddie Jim
“It’s like a minefield,” she said. “If a truck’s coming the other way you can’t dodge it – you have to hit the pothole.
“In the last three to four years they don’t even try to fix the road, they just do patch-up jobs. But all it takes is some rain and a few trucks go over it and it’s all gone again.”
Experts and councils say a growing number of trucks on our roads and more extreme weather brought on by climate change are inflicting unprecedented damage to the state’s roads. A substantial increase in maintenance spending is needed, they say.
The Age this month reported that almost 500 kilometres of state government-managed arterials and highways are in such poor condition that they require temporary speed limit reductions or other safety measures.
An Age reader shared this video of them blowing a tyre after hitting a pothole on the Princes Highway in Corio this month.Credit: Supplied
That includes Tylden-Woodend Road, where Stembridge’s gearbox met its maker. The 100km/h speed limit there has been cut to 40km/h in some sections for the past two years to make it safe for motorists to navigate the large and frequent potholes.
The state government has committed to fixing the road by the middle of next year – but Stembridge said that’s too late.
Tylden-Woodend Road is a busy arterial with a large volume of trucks and Stembridge said it needed to be resealed and resurfaced urgently.
“It’s not much to ask – we all pay our regos, don’t we,” she said.
The Age last week asked readers to nominate roads that are in poor condition, prompting more than 60 responses from angry and frustrated drivers – including five about Tylden-Woodend Road. They also complained about potholes on the Mornington Peninsula Freeway, Bass Highway, Hamilton Highway, Dandenong Road, Toorak Road and the Melba Highway.
Many pointed out the risk of instinctive swerving to avoid the large, deep potholes that can appear to rush up on motorists. Some pointed out that the potholes were particularly dangerous for motorcyclists.
One reader shared recent dashcam video of them hitting a pothole on the Princes Highway in Corio, blowing out their tyre. Another said the potholes on one Victorian highway were so bad they saw “a small car get launched into the air”.
And it’s not just potholes. Just under 85 per cent of metropolitan roads met the state government’s standard for cracking in 2023-24, according to the transport department’s annual report. That has been in a gradual decline since 2020-21, when 95 per cent met the standard.
The Allan government last month announced a $964 million repair blitz to fix the cracks and potholes that have riddled the road network since heavy flooding inundated the state in late 2022.
But Scott Elaurant, chair of Engineers Australia’s Transport Australia Society, said all state and federal governments had significantly underspent on road maintenance for years, even as roads were being damaged by increasing truck volumes and severe weather.
Elaurant said trucks caused almost all the damage, by cracking the thin layer of pavement used on most roads around the country.
“If that happens in wet weather, water penetrates in, washes away the material underneath, and you get a pothole,” said Elaurant, who has four decades’ experience in road engineering and transport economics.
The volume of trucks on Victorian roads – measured by the total kilometres driven – has grown by 56 per cent over the past 20 years, data from the federal infrastructure department shows. That compares with an 18 per cent increase in car and other light-vehicle kilometres.
“Unless someone’s willing to make a much more substantial investment in our rail freight network … the potholes aren’t going away,” he said.
Elaurant said Australia was one of the biggest spenders on road construction among OECD nations, but one of the lowest on maintenance.
“We’re developing a system that is neither cheap nor effective,” he said.
Local councils manage more than 75 per cent of Victoria’s roads.
Municipal Association of Victoria president Jennifer Anderson said it was already a challenge for councils to maintain them from their rates base and federal grants – and the funding gap would only grow as climate change inflicted more damage.
Macedon Ranges Shire, where Anderson is a councillor, has had 12 declared natural disasters in the past four years.
She said Victoria needed to put more emphasis on “building back better” programs to make infrastructure more resilient to the next disaster.
“Every time you get one of these events, you get more potholes. So they’re just trying to keep up with the usual levels of maintenance, but you’re continually chasing your tail because of each subsequent weather situation that occurs,” Anderson said.
“Usually you provide the evidence of what it was before, and then they give you the funds to get it back to what it was like before, which is no longer fit for purpose given climate change.”
Some councils were given “build back better” funding last year after the floods, but it was “not the norm as it is in some of the other states”, Anderson said.
National Transport Research Organisation chief executive Michael Caltabiano said an $8 billion federal assistance scheme, funded by a nationwide levy, helped Queensland rebuild rural roads with either bitumen or cement-treated bases to increase their resilience after Cyclone Yassi and flooding devastated the state in 2010 and 2011.
“They’ve had many subsequent events, and the network has stood up exceptionally well,” Caltabiano said.
“They have had a step change in the way in which they think through the resilience of their rural and regional networks, and I’m confident that same process is happening in [Victoria] at the moment.”
Caltabiano said the decline in fuel excise revenue as vehicles became more fuel efficient or switched to electric demanded a new conversation about how to fund road works into the future.
“The funding pool is diminishing, whilst the maintenance and rehabilitation needs are increasing. There is a disconnect, and it’s just getting bigger and bigger,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Allan government said the recently announced repair blitz was the biggest single-year maintenance program in the state’s history.
“We’re also investing $6.6 billion in road maintenance over 10 years, allowing us to adopt a more strategic and sustainable approach to repairing and rebuilding our roads,” the spokesperson said.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.