Community
18 July, 2025
Renewed calls for road repair action
RESIDENTS and regular users of the Darlington-Camperdown Road have renewed calls for road repairs following a rollover where the condition of the road was a contributing factor.
A small truck rolled over on the Darlington-Camperdown Road on Monday, with the driver uninjured.
Corangamite Shire deputy mayor Laurie Hickey, who was also an attending Country Fire Authority (CFA) member for the Bookaar brigade, said the section of road where the accident occurred was known for getting slippery after light rain.
“I believe this road needs some more aggregate on the top – the asphalt has bled through the surface and has made it very slippery,” he said.
“In the event of some light rain, it becomes very slippery and motorists are finding it quite challenging to maintain contact on the road.
“There was a speed limit reduction signs put up here some years ago, but it still hasn’t seemed to have prevented people skidding off the road.
“A lot of volunteer time is taken up by retrieving vehicles that do slip off the road – the fire brigade are usually the first ones to be called.
“It is an issue, and people could get seriously hurt coming off the road.”
CFA volunteer Andrew Duynhoven, who also lives along the Darlington-Camperdown Road, recalled a number of incidents which had occurred on the same section as Monday’s accident.
“There are tankers and road trains pulling into my driveway at night – they’re slowing down to pull into my driveway, and the ABS kicks in and one of them went straight ahead and didn’t make the turn,” he said.
“We’ve had another four or five incidents in this spot.
“A bloke who was managing the goat farm up the road did the same thing – the ABS corrected and ploughed him straight into a tree, and he spent five months in the hospital in the spinal ward before his release.
“Then we had a local who knows the road do the same thing coming along the other way – she skidded and went off to the side of the road.
“That was a bit over a year ago, and about three or four weeks later a gentleman on a motorcycle did the same thing.”
The 24.5-kilometre road, which sees around 2500 vehicles daily, has been reduced to 80km/h along 14.2 kilometres for between two to three years and is one of Corangamite Shire Council’s advocacy priorities for 2024-2025.
While council is calling for the road to be widened to meet the Performance Based Standards (PBS) of lane width of 3.2 metres and shoulders 1.5 metres wide, regular users of the road are calling for roughing out slippery patches and repairs on areas where there are numerous potholes.
Helen Baldwin, who uses the road regularly to travel from Darlington to Camperdown, said the condition of the road was “shocking”.
“It is so bad that you don’t really know what part of the road is good and what part of the road is potholes, especially after rain as the potholes fill with water,” she said.
“They fixed some of the road – they fixed the part of the road that didn’t need fixing and have left the part that really does need fixing.
“It’s pretty slippery on the road too, even when you have got good tyres on your car.
“People are going to have a serious accident because they’re going to go down that road, hit a pothole, wreck their tyre or axel, then end up skidding off the road and end up killing themselves because of the potholes.”
Lyn Hanns, another regular user of the road, said more funding was needed to maintain roads in general.
“I find it very dangerous – it keeps knocking my wheels about and putting my car out of alignment, and it costs money to get it fixed,” she said.
“It’s atrocious. It’s going to cause a nasty accident, that’s for sure.
“The road is dangerous – very slippery in places – but the biggest hazard is the broken edges and the potholes.
“The broken edges are bad, especially when you need to pull over to let another vehicle pass – it knocks your tyres about, and it’s not cheap.
“Why don’t VicRoads build our roads anymore – they know what they’re doing.”
Cr Hickey said there was a solution to improve the conditions of the road.
“It would be great if we could get some representatives from VicRoads to have a look at the situation and apply some stone aggregate to the surface to improve road adhesion,” he said.
Mr Duynhoven said he was concerned there would be a serious accident due to the number of trucks which use the road.
“They’ve done a lot of upgrades up the road, to their credit, but the road just needs a bit of attention,” he said.
“It just needs a bit of roughing up or more aggregate put on.
“I’m not talking about a full rebuild of the road, it just needs to be roughed up. Someone needs to put it in the budget.”
Ms Baldwin had a simple message to the government.
“Fix the roads, fix the potholes, and stop being slack about it,” she said.
“Stop wasting money on things we don’t need, and Victoria doesn’t end at Melbourne – there’s people further out.”
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