General News
25 January, 2026
Driving on Victoria’s roads: a whole new alphabet of pain
Kangaroos now cause less damage than potholes, and they’re smart enough to hop around them. A tongue-in-cheek look at life behind the wheel in the west.
NAVIGATING the roads of Western Victoria in Australia is less a journey and more an impromptu archaeological dig, as the potholes, undulations and general deviations from a smooth, straight surface become ever more common.
Living and working in the region after being in Melbourne most of my life has definitely been an education on a whole lot of matters pertaining to Australian farming.
Still, having also done some casual shifts as a bus driver now as well, I’ve come to appreciate how the A, B and C prefixes given to various numbered routes around the country don’t just tell you something about the amount of traffic you can expect, but inform about the average Wheel Bending Severity (WBS) on the various roads.
There’s only a handful of ‘A’ designated routes nationally.
Even they are deteriorating here in Victoria, so the fact that there’s lots more Bs and Cs should give you a better idea of what is out there – while a WBS event of 1 (likely just a loud thud as your tyres flex their radials) is common everywhere now, a score of 5 means not just mangled shreds of black rubber trailing behind your vehicle like a bad memory, but a rim that will resemble some of the finest abstract art in the world.
(Reports that local automotive and tyre repairers have been quietly applying for government grants to open up next-door galleries have yet to be confirmed.)
Going for a simple trip into town for the week’s groceries at Woollies has become a white-knuckle rally stage, complete with an active navigator required, where the local wildlife, from kangaroos to wallabies, are actually now causing much less vehicle carnage than the craters they are smart enough to hop around.
They know. They’ve seen the suspensions of better cars than yours succumb to the lunar landscape that is a B-or-lower-grade road.
Beware in the wet, especially the patches with the tea-coloured water – that’s not an artisan Indian infusion with creamy Jersey milk – if your hub-Continentals take a sip of that, you’ll be Darjeeling into car-wheeling no more.
This area might be some distance from the ocean, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have waves out here too – just take a drive on the Wimmera Highway out west – the loping rise and fall with constancy will threaten to reacquaint you with your morning’s breakfast if you take it too fast.
Who needs to do rock-climbing and abseiling at the Arapiles when you can realistically simulate the comparable up-and-down experience on the way out there?
Then, of course, there are the roads beyond the official alphabet – the thin, weathered tracks of (mostly) bitumen that stitch together the region’s vast paddocks and lonely creeks.
For the sake of consistency, let’s call these ‘D roads’.
I admit, it feels almost unfair to critique them – they are less a failure of local council maintenance and more a testament to the significant challenge of taming the 1000s of kms on the meagre budget crumbs from the state.
They represent a valiant battle against nature and distance, where tyre-snapping abysses and crumbling fringes are more common than magpies, corellas and white cockatoos.
They often narrow into single-lane lottery draws, where meeting a rumbling B-double in the opposite direction forcing you into the gravel counts as a low-level prize, and having to jump off a razor sharp foot-high edge at speed coming over a crest to avoid a local tractor – towing a hay baler with its jagged, mechanical arms splayed out like a metallic predator – counts as one of the bigger wins – rare but like a million bucks an experience you’ll never forget for the rest of your life... which won’t be that long anyway, if you continue driving on D roads.
There are other acronyms that I am proposing as a necessary score of Road Degradation Studies in 2025, such as Proportional Pothole Ratio (PPR), SSI (Suspension Shock Index) and DAM (Driver Anguish Metric), measured in frequency and decibels of exclaimed expletives per kilometre.
(Coefficient of Roadway Aggravation and Peril seemed too similar to much of what the State Government has already implemented, so it was dumped.)
The final score of LOD (Likelihood of Detour) is a real-time calculation of whether the physical and psychological toll of the designated route outweighs the benefits of arriving at your destination with your sanity – and suspension – intact.
It would be great to see Google Maps include this information in future updates – it also gives some scope for much less predictable, and certainly more entertaining, driving instructions over Bluetooth:
"WBS 3.2 event in 200 metres. Grip steering wheel firmly and proceed with caution.”
“A high LOD calculation from a PPR of 0.45 recommends a detour. Rerouting to preserve wheel alignment.”
“Why are you travelling on a D road anyway? Initiating last-known-GPS-coordinates protocol.”
Together, the WBS, PPR, SSI and LOD can form a much-needed standardised report card on the roads, finally giving the Victorian Government a clear, acronym-laden framework they can safely ignore.
In keeping with the action we expect from them, they will of course deliver... some media releases, with – as only bureaucrats can do – more acronyms to learn:
DELAY (Deferred Engineering and Logistics, Annually Yours)
STALL (State-Tolerated Asphalt Lane Loss)
NIL (Negligent Infrastructure Levy)
Western Victorians will note wryly that a prominent A road – the A8 Western Highway – goes through Stawell and Nhill, with a little Wail appropriately somewhere in between.
Seems fitting, just like a new set of tyres and rims.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then it is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by a pothole, full of sound and fury, signifying a flat tyre.