It’s great to see that Pakenham Road in Pakenham Upper gets some road improvements in the not too distant future.
$1.7 odd million (or so the flashy sign on the road says) is a great deal of money to fix one problematic drain that keeps flooding every time we get a good drenching.
The disappointing thing is that one of the busiest and most diabolical intersections on this road gets no major improvement… yet again.
The intersection of Morrison, Pakenham, Bourkes Creek and Doyle roads has been void of any reasonable improvements in the last 20 years.
Yet the population, traffic flows and speed of traffic have increased considerably for this major north-south route in the shire.
Add this to the buck passing of bureaucracy that sees calls to the shire to assist in clearing the marble like stones from the intersection that only promote our cars, bikes and trucks to fail to stop before sliding into the intersection, be referred to VicRoads to fix is, to say the least, frustrating.
We can only hope one day, that our elected representatives can work cohesively together with our state government officials and collectively use our rates, car registrations, fuel excise and general taxes for the real needs of the community and not to avoid those projects that are just in the ‘too hard’ basket, or awaiting the next fatality to promote the project to a more realistic priority.
This intersection needs an engineering fix, dedicated turning lanes, traffic islands or at least something that stops traffic tailgating us who have to turn off and on to Pakenham Road and I don’t call a ‘slow down’ sign an engineering fix, although someone may take credit for proposing that solution.
Brendan Buckland,
Pakenham Upper.