Worst roads flagged red

The online survey typically attracts a wide pool of responses – last year about 10,000 motorists participated.

NRMA director for the western region of NSW Graham Blight said the response so far this year had been encouraging.

“We are already up to 8500 participants so far and we still have the rest of the month to go,” Mr Blight said.

Voting for the Seeing Red on Roads survey closes on August 31.

Mr Blight said local motorists knew their roads and as such this survey was an invaluable source of information showing the quality of roads from across the State.

“Local people are driving on the roads all the time so they know where the worst roads are,” he said.

He said the survey results helped to make the government aware of what roads required immediate attention.

“These survey results validate our submissions and complaints (about our roads) to the government.”

The survey results have the advantage of being sourced from many thousands of eyes on the ground, and he said provided a good indication of where and what the problems were.

He said complaints of bad roads from motorists ranged from minor to major costing issues.

He said many roads which were typically highlighted as problem roads were some of the major highways, such as the Olympic and New England.

“Bells Line of Road is also a classic example, and it gets attention because it is such a terrible road.”

He said surveys and community responses helped translate into action down the track.

“Things do eventually happen, for example, we have seen this at Gocup Road near Tumut – that has been a horrible road for a long time, and we have been putting that on our priority list for the government,” he said.

“In the last State budget Gocup Road got an allocation of funding.”

Meanwhile, Roads Minister Duncan Gay said last week more than 90 regional councils had applied for grants under the Fixing Country Roads program of $37.5 million, which was announced in the budget.

“For too long, the bush was abandoned by former Labor governments, but we are putting Country NSW at the forefront again,” Mr Gay said.

“This government is delivering infrastructure across regional and rural NSW, the likes of which has never been seen in this State before – this is a real roads renaissance.”

Mr Blight said the recent State budget had seen some good developments, with considerably more money allocated to roads which would have an impact.

However, he said the budget had highlighted some roads that had been mentioned in previous budgets, for example, the Tenterfield bypass, which he said has been in the past two budgets.

“We call this old money – what we continually look for is new money,” Mr Blight said.

While he said there was nothing wrong with old money – as it meant it had not gone off the radar – it was important to highlight new road funding.

“Although there was some money for roads in the budget, the amount of new money wasn’t as high as we had hoped.

“An area that needs some attention is the Sturt Highway going into Wagga Wagga, and then the Olympic Highway going south from Wagga to Albury,” Mr Blight said.

He said while money had been allocated in the budget before last on the Olympic Highway, not much had been done yet.

Mr Blight said while he understood it was a slow process, it was still frustrating.

He said one of the changing issues he had seen with regard to roads during the past 10 years, was more road freight using east to west routes given a rise of inland industries, including timber and mining, while transport routes were changing.

Often, those routes included roads through smaller towns and council areas.

“The towns may not be getting the economic benefits out of these industries, but their roads are being affected by heavy transport,” Mr Blight said.

He said there needed to be more overall planning when it came to developing industries to ensure road freight routes were suitable and the cost of improvements did not only have to be met by councils.

“There has to be a more co-ordinated approach,” he said.

Vote at My NRMA.