Some apologetic rays from a setting sun were the best bit of a wet winter's day last week, as I drove towards Muswellbrook along the New England Highway. Then, bang, and the car veered sharply, towards the kerb, luckily, a front tyre shredded by a giant pothole. Fortunately, the shoulder of the road was wide, a safe place to call for roadside assistance.
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I waited under the lights of the Ashton coal mine, operated by Yancoal, the giant Chinese energy company. Its day shift workforce was exiting, joining the stream of miners heading home from the Hunter Valley's moonscape of open cuts. It crossed my mind that this dangerous, potholed highway should have been upgraded by now, given the profits that flow to offshore mining companies and the mining royalties gifted to state government coffers.
Skilled, courteous NRMA staff soon had me limping home on an emergency wheel, with the advice I shouldn't exceed 80km/h, so I took the back roads. I saw the extent of the road damage that the rains are causing. There are potholes everywhere.
Finding a solution to our roads problem won't be easy. Scientists tell us the intensity of storm events is linked to climate change, and coal furnaces are a huge contributor to greenhouse gases. But exiting coal, in the Hunter, and across Asia, won't be achieved easily. These rain events aren't going anywhere.
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The cost of fixing local roads is arresting. A rule of thumb is that restoring and resurfacing a local road costs $1 million per kilometre. In its 2022-23 budget, Cessnock council allocates $11 million for local road renewals, from an annual rates revenue pool of only $45 million.
Roads are a huge burden on a council budget with, in the case of Cessnock, responsibilities ranging across playgrounds, sporting fields, libraries, cultural facilities, tourist services, two major business and commercial districts, drainage, flood management, an airport, and a regional waste depot. Cessnock manages 1100km of local roads, an impossible task for its meagre budget.
But we all hate potholes, for good reasons, and we want our local road repaired pronto.
Councils beg for patience. Newcastle council has a pothole web page pleading for sympathy, given it services 800km of local roads. Central Coast Council said in a news release in June it had filled 32,000 potholes since February.
The cost of fixing local roads is arresting. A rule of thumb is that restoring and resurfacing a local road costs $1 million per kilometre.
A problem is that most of our local roads were never built to carry the level of traffic they now experience. Roads through the Hunter's nappy belt, especially, are in strife.
This is the strip of new residential developments on the western fringes of Newcastle and Lake Macquarie and across the Cessnock, Maitland, Singleton and Port Stephens local government areas.
My calculation from the latest census says the nappy belt has grown by 66,000 residents in just 15 years, the equivalent of adding an extra LGA the size of Cessnock. The traffic implications are obvious. Yet we live at a time when planning in the Hunter has become little more than glossy diagrams and flowery prose.
New housing lacks public transport. There are no large concentrations of jobs in central locations to connect to. High streets are abandoned in favour of drive-to malls, drive-to bulky goods precincts, and e-commerce where a truck drives to your front gate.
And motorists are ever on the search for shortcuts. All across the nappy belt once quiet rural roads are torn asunder by cross-country traffic trying to access higher-speed main roads, and the expressway.
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We live with the consequences of planning failure. Every adult has a car, every child a chauffeur, every parcel a delivery van. But our roads cannot cope. And our local councils don't have the money to do anything except send out trucks loaded with hot bitumen and a GPS tracker.
Rightfully, we whinge about the poor services we get from local government.
Yet, in the Hunter, local government is stuck with the planning and transport infrastructure mess that state and federal governments have delivered over the past two decades.
Local government has neither the resources or the powers to create a long-term solution to what the scatter approach to planning has delivered.
Get used to your potholed road.
