THERE is "miles too much" bitumen on infrequently travelled bush roads in Federation Shire, their council overseer believes.
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Engineering services director Steve Carmichael said the wide application of bitumen in the 1960s and 1970s to country roads meant the council was now struggling to maintain them.
"A lot of those roads should never had been sealed to start with," Mr Carmichael said referring to routes such as the Hopefield Siding Road.
"They should have been left as gravel roads because there is just not the traffic volumes.
"For a bitumen road to operate properly you need somewhere between 150 and 300 vehicles a day, those roads are probably lucky if they get 20.
"This council has got miles too much bitumen seal for the amount of traffic.
"And we're not the only council, there's councils everywhere in Australia that have got the same problems.
"It was easy to do many years ago and there was a lot of it done, those narrower ones especially were done and everybody has the same problem, what do you do to try and hold them together."
Mr Carmichael was commenting at last week's Federation Council meeting in response to councillor Fred Longmire raising concerns of bush residents about the poor state of roads.
The engineering chief said the council was looking to apply an "inexpensive" reseal of $4 a square metre to roads.
"What we're trying to do there is just hold them together," Mr Carmichael told the councillors.
"(We can) take the bitumen off, get rid of it and revert it to gravel road, and I think if we went to the ratepayers, the ratepayers would say 'we're happy with the little bit of seal we've got'.
"We haven't got the money to rehabilitate them,
"To rehabilitate the amount of roads I've got in that condition we'd need an injection of millions and millions of dollars.
"We just haven't got that sort of money, so council has got to concentrate on strategies to hold them together."
