Emily St was closed for almost three hours on May 26 after a truck carrying offal lost some of its load.
A man, 84, drove out of the Liberty service station and pulled in front of the truck. The truck driver applied the brakes, causing the offal to spill on the road and the back of the cab of the truck.
Seymour’s Greg Sharp lives on Emily St and said the near-miss was the latest in a string of incidents at that section of the road.
“Heaps of people leave the Liberty service station or McDonald’s and dart across two lanes of traffic to do a U-turn,” he said.
“The system we have now relies on people looking before they drive out, but they hardly ever do.
“The commonsense thing to do would be to take a left turn and go around the block to go back the other way, but people take the quickest and easiest option.
"People need to remember to treat Emily St like a street and not a highway.’’
Mr Sharp said he had approached Regional Roads Victoria (RRV) on a previous occasion to re-look at the road design
He is worried someone will need to be killed at the intersection before any action was taken.
“If other places in Victoria are anything to go by, someone is going to have to pay the ultimate price before our concerns are taken seriously,” he said.
“Sadly, we can’t rely on people doing the right thing on the road. We must make them take a safer option.
“If we plan to keep developing Emily St and attracting more business, the road has to be looked at. It is not suitable and far too dangerous to be adding more businesses and more traffic.”
In a statement, RRV said the most recent assessments of the duplicated section of Emily St found it had sufficient capacity to support growth in current traffic volumes.
“Road rules state U-turning traffic must give way, including those turning left from Tallarook St, and only cross when it is safe to do so,” the statement said.
“When prioritising works, RRV takes a holistic view of the network and makes choices that will deliver the greatest benefits to Victorians.”
RRV northern regional director Brian Westley said RRV wanted everyone to be safe on the roads, which was why it frequently carried out maintenance and road hazard inspections across the region, including on Emily St.
“We have road safety experts out on the system every day and we work with councils and Victoria Police to monitor if and where any improvements need to be made to our road network,” he said.
“We all have a role to play in road safety and we urge everyone to drive responsibly, obey the road rules and ignore distractions.”
Seymour resident Hank Kreemers said he didn’t have the answers to fix the problems with Emily St but agreed it needed to be looked at.
“It doesn’t matter how many times you tell people to look before they shoot out in to traffic, they won’t listen,” he said.
“All options should be on the table, including traffic lights or a roundabout. It’s not up to the community to be coming up with solutions. A review by RRV should identify the problem and find a way to fix it.
“Something has to be done or one of the many near-misses we see will become a fatality.
“We must find a way to make people do the right thing.”
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