Roads to ruin close to home

Peter Farago
COUNCILS joining together to lobby to fix the Princes Highway between Geelong and Mount Gambier have a long road to travel if previous road projects in the region are anything to go by.
Seventeen councils that sit along the highway, including City of Greater Geelong and Surf Coast, last week launched a campaign to fix the road, one of western Victoria’s main freight thoroughfares.
Construction of Geelong’s bypass is no doubt giving impetus to the campaign, with the four-lane freeway eventually set to funnel most of the city’s existing freight traffic around central Geelong and into Waurn Ponds.
But it’s at the Anglesea Road turn-off that Princes Highway traffic begins to get squeezed into the countryside.
In fact, the very first section of the A1 after the roundabout at Anglesea Road is an accident blackspot.
State Government has vowed to duplicate the highway between Geelong and Colac on at least two occasions.
But the project has yet to get off the ground as the Labor Government gets bogged down in a finger-pointing exercise with its federal Liberal counterpart over money.
The Federal Government, of course, says that because it is no longer part of the national highway system it’s not a Commonwealth responsibility.
Yet a count of semi-trailers still crawling south along Latrobe Terrace tells a different story.
It tells of a highway that crosses a state border, taking vital freight to and from South Australia’s south-east corner.
Back in Geelong, there are roads telling more stories of woe to civic leaders.
While construction work slowly snakes around Geelong’s north-west on the bypass, the Bellarine Highway to the city’s east is falling apart.
In fact, the four-lane highway between the city’s urban fringe and Leopold has earned a speed reduction instead of new bitumen, such is the state of the ageing road.
And the parallel Portarlington Road is approaching a similar state in sections.
Both these roads carry thousands of motorists each day during the week and ferry tourists to the Bellarine Peninsula’s playgrounds on weekends.
They don’t require federal funding but that doesn’t mean they don’t require attention either.
While City of Greater Geelong is right to join a fight to improve the Princes Highway, it should also look closer to home for arterial road projects to lobby for on our behalf.