Election cycles come and go, but every year regional and rural Australians are forced to put up with roads so bad they threaten lives and livelihoods. Why does nothing ever seem to change?
When Emma Jorgensen got the call saying her friend had been involved in a car crash, she didn't need to ask where.
"We instantly knew it happened on that road," she says.
"If anything was going to happen, it was going to be on that shocking road."
Emma says people have been calling for Bald Nob Road near Glen Innes to be fixed since she was a child growing up on the News South Wales Northern Tablelands.
The road is a 100-kilometre-per-hour cracked and potholed hypotenuse, cutting out an extra 36km from an otherwise V-shaped route on the drive between inland Queensland and Grafton.
It is narrow and the road's shoulders give way to gravel and dirt, but it is where smartphone maps and GPS apps will likely direct travellers.
It was on the Easter long weekend in 2016 when Emma's friend Kylie "Cai" McLennan was driving down Bald Nob Road.
She was travelling under the speed limit around a corner when she veered onto the opposite side of the road, about lunchtime on Easter Monday.
She pulled the car back into the correct lane, but her two left wheels got caught in gravel on the road's shoulder.
It caused her to slide back into the path of an oncoming car, causing a major collision.
Kylie McLennan's car rolled onto its roof.
She died at the scene.
Emma Jorgensen is "100 per cent convinced" the poor quality of Bald Nob Road was a factor in her friend's death.
For six years, she has lobbied to get it repaired and upgraded.
In February 2020, four years after Kylie McLennan's death, NSW state Northern Tablelands MP Adam Marshall announced just shy of $400,000 in funding to upgrade Bald Nob Road.
The works, which included widening the road and installing safety guardrails, were scheduled to be completed by February 2021. As of March 2022, they have yet to begin.
A further $4.5 million was secured at the end of 2021 through the federal government's Roads of Strategic Importance program, to improve safety and rehabilitate more than half of the 11km road.
Leonie Buchanan lives on Bald Nob Road and can see it directly from her property. She calls it a "terrifying" road.
"They just keep saying, 'The money is allocated and we're going to do it this year,' and nothing has happened," she says.
Glen Innes Severn Council's director of infrastructure services Keith Appleby says he is grateful for the funding after years of lobbying, but is frustrated the road was not able to be fixed sooner.
"There's no doubt that it was deserving, but it just fell through the gaps," Mr Appleby says.
"We strongly advocate for an increase in recurrent, untied funding for road maintenance."
'It'd be quicker to name the good ones'
Almost every Australian country town and regional centre has a notoriously bad local road, if not several.
It remains a reliable year-on-year topic on ABC regional radio stations, where talkback lines are routinely inundated with complaints about damaged and dangerous roads.
A recent post on the ABC Rural Facebook page asking if people had a bad country road in their area garnered hundreds of comments and photos from all over the country.
"Just about every road in rural Victoria has got a problem," read one comment.
"Take your pick out where I am — too many to mention," read another.
"All country roads are neglected till someone gets killed or seriously injured."
"It’d be quicker to name the good ones."
More than half of the annual road crash deaths occur in regional Australia.
For communities in these areas, having to put up with bad local roads has become an unacceptable norm, according to Sara Bice, director of the Australian National University's Institute for Infrastructure in Society.
She says the responsibility can too often fall on local governments to fix and upgrade road networks, many of whom possess a fraction of the resources required.
"Let's take New South Wales as an example — there, local governments are responsible for approximately 90 per cent of roads by surface area," Professor Bice says.
Those local governments rely on federal funding and grants programs to support repairs and safety improvements, as well as vital road projects and infrastructure work.
State governments across the country also have their own schemes, such as NSW's Saving Lives On Country Roads Program or Victoria's Fixing Country Roads Program.
New research from Professor Bice's team has found the public increasingly feels funding for infrastructure projects is overly politicised.
A recent survey of more than 3,500 people across the country found 59 per cent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that infrastructure projects in Australia are "approved for political reasons rather than what will most benefit the community".
"You can infer from that, unless they have some political capital that could be gained through their project being advanced, they're not going to be a priority," Professor Bice says.
A separate Grattan Institute report released last week found almost none of the dozens of transport projects promised by the Coalition and Labor during the last election campaign had a business case approved by Infrastructure Australia.
"Pork-barrelling wastes money and it's unfair," the report's author Marion Terrill, from the Grattan Institute, told ABC AM.
Federal funding for roads is supposed to come in part from the fuel excise — a 44-cent-per-litre tax on petrol.
Analysis from motoring groups has found that only 53 per cent of the $127.3 billion raised by the petrol tax over the past decade has actually been reinvested in roads and public transport.
In its 2022-23 pre-budget submission, the Australian Local Government Association has called for hundreds of millions more in roads funding for councils across the Roads to Recovery, Black Spot and Local Roads and Community Infrastructure programs.
Professor Bice says it is time for a rethink of Australia's road funding model.
"This is a collective issue for regional and rural Australia," she says.
"I think the first important step is a national-level conversation about the current infrastructure status in regional and rural Australia.
Changed use and changed climate
It isn't just funding alone that frustrates regional communities.
A routine complaint of regional road users the ABC spoke to was about the increased presence of larger trucks dominating and, in some cases, damaging local roads, many of which weren't built for such weight and size.
Anita Poteri lives just off Pomona Kin Kin Road in south-east Queensland's Noosa hinterland.
In 2020, it landed the unenviable title of Worst Road in Queensland in the RACQ's Unroadworthy Roads Survey.
That wasn't a surprise, or even too much of a concern for Ms Poteri.
"It was doable for the residents to drive. It's just when the quarry trucks increased that it became a problem," she says.
A recent change to the lease ownership of the nearby quarry now sees a daily stream of large trucks travelling along Pomona Kin Kin Road.
In footage captured by locals, trucks are seen travelling back and forth along the narrow road.
One truck takes a tight corner and ends up in the middle of the road.
Another truck swings around the corner so far it is almost perfectly aligned in the wrong lane facing oncoming traffic.
At one point, a local cyclist can be seen riding behind on the road's edge.
Noosa Council is engaged in a court battle with the quarry's operators in an attempt to reduce the number of trucks on the road.
Further south, northern Victorian farmer Brett Hosking wishes he could take more of his grain industry's trucks off the road.
The Quambatook-based chairman of peak industry group GrainGrowers says the grains industry was originally built around a rail network, but a lack of investment has forced a shift over time to using more trucks.
"One train replaces 40 trucks on the road — so it's a far more efficient way of moving grain, it's a far safer way of moving grain," Mr Hosking says.
"All of a sudden, you can see … the extra wear and tear on the road network with those trucks."
The grains industry has roughly 22,500 farms around the country, about 80 to 90 per cent of which are family farms, according to Mr Hosking.
Even though the industry is made up of regional community members and uses local roads, Mr Hosking says it lacks a degree of political capital at a grassroots level.
"Governments need to be elected and grain can't vote," he says.
"It's a relatively small group of users — being the farming and supply chain logistics community — compared with say, building a new art gallery in the middle of Melbourne.
"What we haven't really assessed is what the unseen cost is. All of a sudden, [grain trucks] are sharing the roads with our families, our school buses, emergency services vehicles, as well as the extra maintenance that's required for a road that's suddenly seen a whole lot of heavy vehicle traffic."
In a pre-budget submission to the federal government, GrainGrowers has called for $1 billion to be invested in local road upgrades through the Roads to Recovery fund and Black Spot Program.
It also wants greater funding for road maintenance, citing the impact of this year's devastating storms and floods. A recent collection of grain from a grower was not able to be completed due to the state of the road.
"As we move toward a more climate-aware society, there is no doubt the future of shifting bulk commodities by truck has an end in sight," Mr Hosking says.
It is a view endorsed by Arun Kumar, an emeritus professor at Melbourne's RMIT University with 50 years of experience in road infrastructure, including time spent working with developing countries for the World Bank.
He wants greater strategic vision for road networks to better prepare for the effects of climate change.
Flooding on the east coast has shown just how damaged roads can become under heavy rain, but Mr Kumar also warns roads in rural areas subjected to extreme heat will increasingly swell and crack.
"Climate change is here," he says.
"Climate change events will reduce the travel network and leave communities isolated and increase the cost of maintenance.
"We need a plan for local areas to see which are the sections that are likely to be damaged first and what should be our strategy, so we're able to better respond to those extreme events."
On the NSW Northern Tablelands, locals are still waiting for Bald Nob Road to be fixed.
The local Glenn Innes Severn Council says a combination of pandemic and extreme weather-related factors have delayed commencement of the works.
The state-funded part of the road's repairs are now scheduled to be fixed by "ideally this financial year," while the larger federally funded upgrades are slated for completion in 2024.
The council's director of infrastructure services, Keith Appleby, says applying for state and federal grants and adhering to their conditions was "almost a full-time job".
For Emma Jorgensen, the process of trying to get the road fixed after her friend's death has been deflating. At every turn, she has felt like responsibility has been shifted to a different level of government: from local to state and federal.
"I … assumed that once a death happened on a pretty bad road that people got their gears in order to fix it. Like, how hard is it to fix an 11km road?
"It's all a bit shit."
Credits
Reporting, photography and digital production: Jeremy Story Carter
Additional supplied vision: Leonie Buchanan, Emma Jorgensen, Anita Poteri
