Just over 100 years ago a royal commission was established to fix a problem that existed for decades.
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The issue was that across the newly federated country, none of the states could agree on a single rail gauge.
This meant if train passengers were travelling from NSW to Victoria, for instance, they had to disembark at Albury and swap trains.
Yet the problem persisted for decades after, with various states declaring their system was the most appropriate.
Astonishingly, the train trip from Melbourne to Adelaide wasn't on a standardised gauge until 1995.
Our national road network is uniform and inclusive and yet the sharing of data about that important network to help us improve it - and save the lives of road users - is not.
And again, it is the failure among the states and territories to agree on a common standard - collecting and measuring the data the same way - that is a key sticking point.
Sadly, for reasons not well understood, the 2024 national road toll is rising alarmingly.
To the end of April - that latest available national figure - there were 438 deaths on our roads nationally, 10 per cent more than for the same period last year.
The April national road toll alone was 25 per cent higher than the average for that month for the previous five years.
At the last budget, the federal government agreed to spend $16.5 billion on improving road infrastructure over the next 10 years.
The carve-up of that federal road funding is being thrashed out now.
Last month, federal Transport Minister Catherine King committed - in the careful, measured language that politicians use - to "seek to include a provision in this negotiated agreement with the states, that will create a requirement for the provision of a nationally consistent data set".
Pork-barrelling - using public money to target certain voter groups for political gain - has long been an issue in the road funding space. Often the business cases supporting projects weren't provided but they went ahead anyway.
Putting the politics well aside, the big dilemma here is the bank of data we have proves our rural and regional roads are our most deadly.
The rate of road crash deaths is 9.6 per 100,000 people across regional Australia.
This is in comparison to 2.2 per 100,000 in major cities.
And, of course, many of those big, regional areas are not Labor-held electorates.
Almost three-quarters of those regional fatal crashes were a result of lane departure (running off the road or having a head-on crash with another vehicle), attributed to issues like fatigue, driver error, and poorly maintained road "shoulders" which offer drivers little or no room for error.
Maintaining around 77 per cent of Australia's roads falls to cash-strapped local councils and there are three key federal funding tranches to support them financially: the Roads to Recovery, the Bridges Renewal and the Black Spot programs.
And recent severe weather events have thrown a spanner in councils' scheduled road programs; road crews, plant and heavy machinery have been diverted off planned programs and into damage repair.
But all roads deteriorate with more traffic and less maintenance.
Not only do we need timely and uniformly-collated crash data but linked to it, a robust audit of our most dangerous, crash-prone country roads.
Only with the best available information can we hope to prevent more tragedy.
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