The tax of fuel we buy is now VERY high but most of it does not go into the repair and upgrade of roads it goes to other Government projects.
If a small percentage more than is now allocated was to roads we would have better ones.
Too bad Government wants to waste it on, political appointments, foreign aid, refugees, and bribes to get the UN security council seat.

I think the thread is well worth talking about.
But thought much before re visiting it.
Some posts kill thread, Phillip S last post sent me away.
But I built or repaired roads.
Then became Union official for road construction blokes.
I know how bad our roads are.
And have an interest in why it is so.
Modern Australian road building follows American practice.
Roads such as the Bruce are built and looked after according to the code know as the California flexible road plan.
Roads flex, all of them, even concrete.
Bruce will have been built from local gravels, some times good some times not.
NSW Pacific, By its very location, in parts had to import gravels, that costs, you can not build a road from dirt, yet.
We must confront truth, Americas population, its wealth, is multiple times ours.
If we took the best contractors and the best men, to build a single 4 lane divided highway, around this country, we would need half our Gross National Product in cash, to get it done in 30 years.
What would we go without?
A problem, government road builders produced the best plant operators right down to traffic controllers.
But the worst most wasteful senior managers.
Planners started planning for road failures 30 years ago.
Instead of quality of road or repair, their plan is to make one dollar build ten dollars worth of poor road.
Remember, costs not laziness stop our small country having good roads.

Belly, I have to admit, I dont know too much about building roads, however you are spot on with funding, our dollars simply dont stretch far enough, esspecially give all the holes we are trying to plug.

As for roads, it is impossible to build a decent road in black soil, so the result is continuous road works, esspecially in western Qld. The B-doubles are killing these roads.

I am afraid this lack of funding is just the beginning, as our declining tax revenue system is simply caving in under the pressure of our local and external expenditure.

Something has to give, but I don't know what.

I can see exactly why we have a road toll as big as we do. It is because of the absolutely dismal policing regime, and the incredible apathy about this particular issue.

Numerous times I have encountered this on OLO – even those who are interested in discussing the broader subject of road safety are apparently not interested or for some reason very reluctant to support the notion of better policing.

I just don’t get, because this really is the key.

And the key point within it is not to have thousands more police out there on the roads, but to have a whole lot more of them behind desks and to encourage the community to do the on-ground work.

Neighbourhood watch has been a very successful program. It is so simple – we simply encouraged to report untoward or suspicious behaviour in our neighbourhoods and the police will check it out.

There doesn’t need to have been any wrongful actions undertaken by anyone, just the suspicion that someone might possibly be up to no good. The police act on this sort of notification very readily.

And then at the complete opposite end of the spectrum we have road safety!

Ludwig: How is more policing or more bureacracy going to prevent tyre blow-outs, mechanical failure, wrong cambering on bends, create more overtaking lanes and dual carriageways?

I believe that in fact driving on the roads today has its own inherent problems created by traffic congestion, continuous checking of speedo, scanning ahead for Radar and Speed traps as well as watching the traffic around you. A driver`s attention is continually being diverted by these and many other distractions, so when you add the poor surface conditions of pot-holes and poor standard patching the table is set for disaster!

We have to accept the fact that traffic flow has increased rapidly over the last few years, however the road inmprovement expenditure has not exponentially increased.

If we are to say that we simply cannot afford to build better roads, for whatever reason, we might as well start putting drivers off the road, an idea itself that is absolutely ludicrous, because we have very little public transport outside the metropolitan areas, due to Government short-sightedness and mis-spent revenue.

Of all the tax collected on the sale of petrol etc approx 25% goes to the roads approx 75% goes to general revenue.