THE remaining potholes in Kilmore’s Sydney Street are likely to stay.
In December, the Department of Transport and Planning (DTP) announced a $964 million road ‘maintenance blitz’ for the state.
However, the term ‘maintenance’ is perhaps misleading, particularly given that the Oxford Languages Dictionary defines the word as ‘The process of preserving a condition or situation, or the state of being preserved.’
If the condition of our roads—whose poor quality has persisted for so long that it could be considered the new standard—were to be preserved, wouldn’t that mean merely preventing new potholes from forming, while leaving the existing ones untouched?
Instead, this ‘maintenance blitz’ has involved complete resurfacing works throughout the state—a patchwork of new and old, of smooth and rough.
‘Blitz’ however, was certainly correct: ‘A sudden concerted effort to deal with something,’ states Oxford, and sudden the works were. Seemingly beginning and finishing overnight, potholes that had been left to crumble into man-sized holes for months simply disappeared.
Perhaps ‘resurfacing blitz’ would have been more fitting.
While the DTP did repair the well-known ‘George’ pothole located at the Clarke Street and Northern Highway intersection—which had decayed into a four by one and a half metre wide crater before it was tended to—and his cousins ‘Bob’ and ‘John’ at the Union Street and Sydney Street intersection, the remaining potholes and raised bitumen throughout the street have remained untouched by workers, while continuing to be battered by the wheels of drivers.
Unfortunately, it appears that these two intersections were the only ‘significant repair works’ listed on the DTP’s agenda, and until the remaining potholes disintegrate into craters—not unlike the infamous ‘George’—they will not be tended to.
The DTP did make sure to point out that they were responsible for managing over 23,000km of road network, which was ‘inspected regularly to ensure compliance with the Road Management Act (2004) and … maintained in accordance with the DTP Road Management Plan.’
Unfortunately for the DTP, a search for the Road Management Plan revealed that the Victorian Government had conducted and approved a review of the plan in 2021 ‘to ensure that the system and standards for inspection, maintenance, and repair of arterial roads and freeways are efficient and appropriate, and result in roads that continue to be safe,’ while the plan itself stated its purpose was ‘to provide a safe … road network for use by all members of the public.’
Given that Oxford describes ‘safe’ as ‘protected from or not exposed to danger or risk; not likely to be harmed or lost,’ perhaps ‘safe’ should be changed to ‘sufferable’, which Oxford states is ‘The ability to experience or be subjected to something bad or unpleasant’, or the four letter expletive—but I don’t think you need a definition for that one.
