How wide should a bush track be?

FOBIF has once again questioned Parks Victoria about its track maintenance policy, after complaints from members about track works in the Fryers Flora Reserve and the Diggings Park. Complaints centred around the tonnes of blue metal put on some of the tracks, and the relentless widening of some roads.

Parks has advised us that recent works are mainly part of flood recovery works. The blue metal on the roads will be gradually packed into the surface. It’s visually not great, but may perform some useful function. More important is the fact that tracks seem to get wider every time work is done on them. This time, the work was done by contractors from Melbourne, who appear to have been given no briefing about how to handle road verges.

Near Tk: the apparently unanswerable question seems to be, how wide does a track need to be?

FOBIF has no problem with roads and tracks being maintained for important purposes, like fire management. Our problem is that over the years we have tried without success to get an answer to a very  simple question: what is the maximum width of a bush track? Given that we’ve measured some of them as wider than the Pyrenees Highway, it seems to be, Pretty Wide.