JOHN BOLITHO

LRRCSC - INQUIRY INTO VICROADS' MANAGEMENT OF COUNTRY ROADS SUBMISSION NO: 258 RECEIVED: 15 JAN 2018

E-Mail:

12 January 2018

The Secretary Law Reform, Road and Community Safety Committee Parliament of Spring Street Vic 3331

Dear Members

Inquiry into VicRoads’ Management of Country Submission

Thank you for inviting residents of Country Victoria to make submissions to this vitally important Inquiry which is so critical to the their safety and the ultimate success or failure of the Victorian Government’s Vision Zero commitment made to the Victorian People.

I make the following submissions in response to the advertised Terms of Reference, which I respectfully ask the Committee to take into account in delivering its Report to Parliament.

Introduction

1. My wife and I are residents of Inverleigh in the . Inverleigh is a small rural town on the Hamilton 27km west of . 1

2. We are self employed and regularly commute by road to Geelong and Melbourne for work and likewise use the local roads to visit friends and family in South West Victoria and other parts of rural and regional Victoria.

3. I am a senior lawyer by profession with extensive professional experience in public policy development in government agencies and in the defence and prosecution of major personal injury claims arising from transport accidents in Victoria and other jurisdictions both in and overseas.

4. I am and have been a member of the Australasian College of Road Safety2 since 1998.

5. I am also a life-long motorcyclist and have been personally and professionally committed to motorcycle safety and improving outcomes for those who have unfortunately been catastrophically injured in road accidents.

1 See eg https://www.goldenplains.vic.gov.au/my-town-inverleigh

2 http://acrs.org.au/

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Principal Response

6. My principal response to the Terms of Reference is that:

• VicRoads is not currently effective in managing Victorian country roads and the challenging mix of vehicles that use them.

• The existing funding model is predominantly Melbourne focused and is not effective in delivering a safe country road system for Country Victoria and puts too many lives at risk every day.

• There has been little or no effective consultation with regional communities. This has resulted in a failure to prioritize critically needed repairs and to properly plan and deliver an effective strategy for the future needs of regional communities and the Inverleigh Community in particular.

• The option for abandoning VicRoads is supported. The creation of a specific Country Roads organization and a separate Metropolitan Roads body is also supported. In addition, the Transport Accident Commission (TAC), which bears the very significant insurance risk of VicRoads decision making and proactively funds more than A$1 Billion in road safety related infrastructure, should be an integral part of both the proposed Metropolitan and Country Roads bodies and potentially solely accountable for the critical road safety functions 3.

VicRoads management of Victorian Country Roads

The Victorian Auditor General (VAGO) tabled his report Maintaining State Controlled Roadways Report and Recommendations in Parliament on 22 June 20174, concluding that there were shortcomings in VicRoads planning and prioritising investment, managing data and measuring performance.

The summary to that Report properly observed that:

“We rely on roads for access to work, schools, shops, recreational activities, health care and other services. Roads also play a critical role in the movement of freight and goods across Victoria. VicRoads manages about 24,000 kilometres of arterial roads. Road networks in poor condition cost the community more, through increased fuel usage, vehicle maintenance costs and travel times. When road surfaces — referred to as road pavements — are in poor condition, they are also more expensive to maintain and repair. In this audit, we assessed whether Victoria’s road network is being effectively and efficiently maintained. We looked at whether VicRoads’ road pavement maintenance program is soundly based and being efficiently managed to achieve the desired outcomes for the state. We focused on road pavement because it accounts for most of VicRoads’ spending on road maintenance. We drew our observations on road pavement maintenance practices mainly from head office processes, enabling a state wide perspective.”

3 http://www.tac.vic.gov.au/road-safety/towards-zero/safer-roads 4 https://www.audit.vic.gov.au/report/maintaining-state-controlled-roadways

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VAGO made five recommendations to VicRoads. VicRoads published a media response to the Report on 22 June 20175. The then CEO properly recognised that many Victorian roads were designed and built in the 1940s and 1950s when the biggest truck was 40 tonnes whereas the average truck size now exceeds 80 tonnes. However this acknowledgement does not purport to address the critical increase in this heavy vehicle fleet and how it intersects with other legitimate users of country roads. This intersection includes the significant pavement damage these heavy vehicles cause and the potentially lethal mix of high speed trucks with commuter cars, motorcycles and bicycles on archaic country road systems. 6

The VicRoads Response also promised a new pavement management approach including initiatives such as:

• Internal organisation changes to form a more cohesive Regional Services Division and centralised Asset Services business to better plan, prioritise and deliver the maintenance program across Victoria; • A community engagement program throughout regional Victoria to ensure that we understand what is important to regional Victorians so we can use the intelligence to inform our decisions; • Different maintenance delivery models, with an intent to deliver the best outcomes to community and deliver on clear performance criteria. Many of these new approaches include data collection, building relationships and working in partnership to both develop and deliver future asset management programs more transparently. However, none of these initiatives appear to consider the critically important road safety issues identified by VAGO or spell out specifically how VicRoads, as a key road safety partner in the Government’s Vision Zero Strategy and Safe System philosophy, intends to practically deliver more than vague best outcome platitudes.

VicRoads and TAC have formally committed to the National Road Safety Strategy, which is based on the Safe System approach to improving road safety. This involves a holistic view of the road transport system and the interactions among roads and roadsides, travel speeds, vehicles and road users7.

Respectfully, the VicRoads media response is indicative of the inaction that has led to country roads being in the deplorable, unsafe, dangerous conditions identified by VAGO. Nor does the media response squarely address the real personal safety and vehicular damage users of country roads face each time they take to a country road and what can actually be done to address them.

TAC properly reflect the social and economic cost to users of country roads of this inaction on its website:

“If we accept this 'road toll' as the price of a rural lifestyle or getting from A to B, another 2,500 people will die in the next 10 years and 50,000 people will be hospitalised with serious and life changing injuries”8.

The financial cost of these numbers to the TAC’s balance sheet is enormous and has the potential in future years to influence premium setting.

5 https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/newsmedia/2017/vicroads-response-to-vago-report-maintaining-state-controlled-roadways 6 https://bitre.gov.au/publications/ongoing/road-trauma-involving-heavy-vehicles.aspx 7 http://roadsafety.gov.au/nrss/safe-system.aspx 8 http://www.tac.vic.gov.au/road-safety/statistics/lives-lost-year-to-date

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The TAC, as the social insurer of those seriously injured and the families of those killed in transport accidents, poignantly recognises the enormity of this to rural Victorians. It is doubtful that any resident in country Victoria would consider this to be an acceptable outcome or that they might become a client of the TAC simply because the regional road system is unsafe and is not properly managed by the Agency which is accountable by its statutory charter to deliver its part of the Safe System bargain in regional and rural Victoria but has not done so.

VicRoads, working closely with the TAC together need to consider and develop a more effective way to have this very real conversation with country communities. It needs to be face to face and both agencies given the opportunity to hear their perspectives and provide reassurance about how they might be addressed.

The VicRoads “engage victoria” strategy goes a very small way towards this but in my experience is unresponsive to suggestions or observations made by concerned members of the community. 9

VicRoads Local Authorities and Federal Government liaison

In addition there appears to be an unfortunate series of silos in place between VicRoads, Local Authorities, the Federal Government and the TAC about rural road safety and road maintenance issues. The consultation between them is not transparent and appears to have all the elements of buck passing.

A practical example is the between Fyansford and Inverleigh, which is in a deplorable state of disrepair. There have been a number of heavy articulated truck accidents in the last 2 years on this stretch of road which also carries a significant number of passenger vehicles given the proximity to Geelong.

When I contacted Golden Plains Shire about particular urgent repairs in 2016 I was told that it was not the Shire’s issue but VicRoads’ accountability, which in turn was dependent on Federal Funding. The Federal Member for Corangamite contemporaneously assured me that the money had been allocated in the 2015 Federal Budget but that VicRoads and the State Government was accountable for the funded upgrades and that I should speak to Golden Plains Shire. The upgrade is finally being done on parts of this stretch of the Highway in January 2018! This is not acceptable.

Likewise local authorities appear to plan growth strategies independently of VicRoads and the impost that their growth strategies place on VicRoads inadequate budget. Two examples involve the Hamilton Highway and Golden Plains Shire.

The first is the Golden Plains Shire proposal to establish one of the largest resource recovery sites in Victoria on the Hamilton Highway near the intersection of Pollocksford Road at Stonehaven, between Inverleigh and Geelong. The site is only 6 minutes from the . The tip would have a 136,000-tonne-a-year capacity and be built in an existing quarry between Pollocksford and Burnside roads10.

Geelong Resource Recovery Facility Pty Ltd has requested planning approval for the waste site and says it would be available to service the Golden Plains Shire, Barwon South West and Grampians Central West region.

9 See footnote 5 above for details of this strategy. 10 http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/news/geelong/stonehaven-tip-objectors-protest-against-location/news-story/78b35c86ecf077e78d7cb82860366890

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The number of heavy trucks using the Hamilton Highway is very significant and this proposal, if it proceeds, will significantly add to the number and the unsustainable loads that these vehicles place on a road that was never designed to carry them. VicRoads’ position about this proposal cannot be ascertained.

Likewise, Golden Plains Shire in their Inverleigh Structure Plan 2017 plans to double the population of Inverleigh (currently 1474) in the next five to ten years.11 There is no public transport available from Inverleigh. The 2016 Census shows that most of the residents in employment work outside of the town12. Families on average own 2.4 motor vehicles. The flow on to traffic on the Hamilton Highway will be significant. Once again, VicRoads’ position about how it will manage this increase in traffic is unknown.

These two examples are likely to be mirrored across Victoria in similar siloing between VicRoads and Local Authorities in rural shires given the State Government Policy encouraging greater density in rural and regional towns and the Shires imperative to increase rates.

VicRoads should be given the power to have a stronger say in whether these plans are feasible given the traffic loads they may create and their inability to fund the flow on to the rural road system. Local authorities should not be able to simply transfer this burden to VicRoads who will have to manage the consequences.

The Hamilton Highway

Vic Roads’ management of the Hamilton Highway is a major concern.

The Hamilton Highway is designated B140 and is the major route to Hamilton and places west including Mount Gambier in .

It is a major freight and agricultural feeder to and from the Port of Geelong.

It carries very high numbers of log trucks, wheat trucks, freight trucks and other major heavy vehicles every day and every night. It is a narrow 2 lane road with very few overtaking lanes making the mix with an increasing number of trucks and passenger vehicles a challenge for management and the whole of government road safety strategy. The photographs below are illustrative

11 https://www.goldenplains.vic.gov.au/consultations/inverleigh-structure-plan

12 http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2016/quickstat/SSC21225

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It is known to be an alternative route to Highway M1 to Western Victoria. Neither VicRoads website nor the Golden Plains Shire data sets show traffic volumes on the Hamilton Highway in an accessible way or at all.

The only data that is available suggests that the peak hour volume on the Hamilton Highway a few kilometers west of Inverleigh in July 2017 was 170 vehicles per hour. This was not apportioned between passenger vehicles and heavy trucks13.

How VicRoads plan road improvements and predict future traffic volumes and weight capacity or manage their obligations under the Road Management Act on rural roads like the Hamilton Highway, amongst many, is not available on its website and should be transparently shared.

Delays in delivery

On 20 July 2015, the Minister for Road Safety announced a TAC funded key safety improvement on the Hamilton Highway at Fyansford at the Corio Road intersection at a cost of A$2,520,000. The work was to be delivered “in the coming months”. It is now January 2018 and the work is still a long way from completion! 14

The status of the other SSRIP funded regional initiatives is not known.

VicRoads manages the development and delivery of the TAC funded SSRIP programs. Good governance and the provisions of the Transport Accident Act demand that the TAC and its Board ensure that their investment is being properly managed by VicRoads and delivered as promised and within budget.

More than a decade ago the RACV observed that:

“ there is no high level commitment in VicRoads or Local Government to effective application of road safety audits” 15

The lack of published information about the outcome and results of contemporary VicRoads road safety audits as contemplated under the Road Management Act suggests that the imperative for proper road safety audits is even more important for regional and rural road users now than it was then. VicRoads publicly extolls its international leadership in road safety auditing and the work it has done in overseas countries. VicRoads’ management of country roads requires a similar world leading best practice principle to be established locally and its findings better communicated to the community.

Motorists who fund the TAC through the TAC Levy (premium) are equally entitled to documented reassurance that the $1.5 SSRIP funding is being impeccably managed. There is a need for much improved transparency as to how the VicRoads delivery performance is audited, measured and managed by the Commission as part of its own statutory accountability.

Maintenance

The Hamilton Highway is generally in very poor condition for all of its length between Penhurst in Western Victoria and Geelong. The road is full of pot holes, has poor road shoulders, and is constantly being patched.

13 https://www.planning.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/69742/Appendix-15-Traffic-Impact-Assessment-Part-1.pdf and see also https://bitre.gov.au/publications/2016/files/is_080.pdf 14 http://www.tac.vic.gov.au/about-the-tac/media-room/news-and-events/2015-media-releases/road-safety-improvements-for-regional-victoria 15 RACV Submission to the VPRSC Inquiry into the Review of Motorcycle Safety in Victoria March 1997 p2 . But see VicRoads International Projects Road Safety on Road safety audit and its experience of same in Botswana, Samoa and other jurisdictions.

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The Facebook page “Fix our rural roads” contains numerous posts and photographic evidence of the state of this major arterial road and others.

Much of Vision Zero strategy is dependent on wire rope barriers, which VicRoads and TAC are installing on major freeways. However their effectiveness is entirely dependent on these barriers being properly maintained16.

The wire rope barriers on the Hamilton Highway between Geelong and Inverleigh at Murgheboluc were severely damaged in two separate major crashes in late October 2017. As the photo below shows, the barrier had still not been repaired as recently as 12 January 2018.

This typical example is a very serious road safety issue that VicRoads is not managing satisfactorily as the community and the TAC expects for regional road users’ safety.

Strip and C roads

VicRoads is responsible for the significant number of rural roads that are little more than strip roads which mostly carry dangerously inappropriate 100kph signage. This photograph is typical

16 “Flexible barriers have been shown to reduce run-off-road and head-on crashes on high-volume roads by up to 85 percent. With Victorians four times more likely to be killed and 40 percent more likely to be seriously injured on regional roads, there is evidence these barriers are already contributing to saving lives” TAC Annual Report 2017 at page 11.

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There are also numerous country roads between major regional towns that are partly divided lane tarred modern design roads and partially strip road with only one tarred lane and gravel sides. Good examples are the critical link road between Inverleigh and Winchelsea and between Shelford and Meredith. VicRoads should be encouraged to complete these partially completed projects urgently.

The TAC data will probably show how many significant country road casualties and fatalities have occurred on country roads fitting this description and how much they have cost the Commission and the community.

Motorcycle Safety

VicRoads’ obligations to motorcycle safety on rural and other roads is helpfully described in publications such as Making roads Motorcycle Friendly – a guide for road design, construction and maintenance – December 2014 and in VicRoads Supplement to Austroads Guides to Road design – Part 6 Roadside Design, Safety and Barriers – July 2011.

Importantly the former makes no mention of the nature and placing of roadside barriers such as wire rope barriers and Armco barriers to meet the need of motorcyclists who might strike them. This is particularly important given Recommendation 47 of the VPRSC Inquiry into Motorcycle Safety in 2012, which recommended retrofitting wire rope barrier posts with cushion products etc. on roads that have been identified as requiring improvements for motorcyclists17.

The only major country road with some wire barrier post attenuation is on the . Unfortunately a rider returning from the Phillip Island superbike races in 2106 is believed to have had the misfortune to strike an unprotected barrier on this road and is now a paraplegic. His severe disabling injury may well have been avoidable had proper attenuators been in place. The TAC will no doubt have more information and data about the incidence and cost of injuries caused by impacts with road-side barrier posts.

Despite VPRSC Recommendation 47 VicRoads continue to install wire rope barriers without these post attenuators on identified motorcycle high-risk roads. A recent example is the installation of wire rope barriers on the Winchelsea Deans Marsh Lorne road. There are no attenuators in place and the barriers are very close to the edge of the road without adequate or safe run off. Ostensibly these do not comply with the motorcycle safety design principles set out above. Nor is the road safety audit of this work available.

17 Inquiry into Motorcycle Safety 2012 Recommendation 47 at xxxv and Fatal Motorcycle into Road Safety Barrier crashes http://acrs.org.au/files/arsrpe/Fatal%20Motorcycle%20Into%20Road%20Safety%20Barrier%20Crashes.pdf

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VicRoads is however to be commended for the installation of rub rails on Armco barriers on other popular motorcycle routes such as the , the and the Blackwood Trentham road in particular.

VicRoads implementation of the VPRSC Motorcycle Safety Inquiry Recommendations that apply to it still requires significant improvement, especially around data sharing, engineering solutions, crash reporting with TAC and other matters relating to its accountability for the management and the delivery of motorcycle safety initiatives and the implementation of good design principles.

Funding model

VicRoads’ ability to manage its statutory obligations will always be dependent on its budget. Currently, the major infrastructure programs in Melbourne and on major freeways appears to be accountable for a very significant proportion of the funds it collects.

The funding model is based on post-war notions of vehicle registration, which take no account of the impost certain classes of vehicles place on the road system itself. VicRoads’ recognition that heavy vehicle weights have doubled from 40 to 80 tonnes reflects this.

“User pays” notions are implicit in the toll road system in Victoria. However, the very heavy vehicles which are responsible for so much of the damage to country roads, are not properly assessed in determining their regulated registration fee. At the very least, the owners and operators of these vehicles should be required to contribute their fair share of VicRoads’ repair and maintenance budget.

VicRoads will also be affected by the disruption in the economy brought about by autonomous vehicles and potentially declining registrations in the next 10 to 15 years. A radical budgetary resetting will be inevitable. It is important that country road users are not further penalised in this process which will be overwhelmingly city-centric.

Different consideration may need to be given to the contribution which major land developers make to the country roads’ system. Major subdivisions add considerable volume to arterial A and B roads under VicRoads’ jurisdiction and developers should likewise contribute significantly more than they currently do.

Lastly in this context, the TAC bears the ultimate cost of injuries caused by poor maintained roads and this real economic cost to motorists should ideally also be factored into VicRoads budgetary reform.

Dismantling VicRoads

The option of dismantling VicRoads and creating a specific properly funded Country Roads Organisation, with a separate Metropolitan Roads Body, is supported, provided adequate budgetary allocation is made available to enable it to deliver to country Victorians. Absent of proper funding, the current malaise can only get worse.

Finally, any consideration to dismantle VicRoads will have to carefully consider the TAC’s admirable internationally recognized role in road safety. There may be considerable advantages to devolving the road safety function to the TAC and confining VicRoads, however configured, to its road management functions under the Road Management Act. The TAC already has a statutory road safety charter obligation. More importantly, it also underwrites the road safety risk and is a multi-billion dollar funder of the consequences of road accidents and poor road infrastructure management.

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Such an evolution is understood to have taken place in British Columbia in Canada, where TAC’s sister organization ICBC is responsible for compensation and road safety, and the Road Corporation primarily for road infrastructure management.

Likewise, WorkCover Victoria has accountability both for industrial health and safety and compensation arising out of workplace accidents. The synergies of these arrangements, particularly in respect of active, direct risk management interventions have been documented and appear self-evident. The unitary data capture and direct analysis is currently needlessly bifurcated.

The achievement of “Vision Zero” is more likely to be achieved if the TAC was entirely accountable for road safety delivery and outcomes and was given the ability to seek recovery from road managers, such as VicRoads, where poor road infrastructure is a major contributor to the payment of compensation.18

Conclusion

I can be available to give evidence before the Inquiry if necessary and my contact details are set out on the first page of my submission.

Yours faithfully,

John Bolitho B.Com; LLB An Australian Legal Practitioner

18 See, for example, s.104 Transport Accident Act