Twenty-three drivers out of 1,809.

You know the sound. The bang through the steering wheel, the sinking feeling, the limp to the shoulder to look at a tyre that's finished. Then the quote: eight hundred dollars, a thousand, sometimes more. For a lot of households that's the grocery budget for a month, and it happened because of a hole in a road somebody else is paid to look after.

So you do the sensible thing. You find the form, you fill it in, you attach the invoice. And weeks later a letter arrives explaining, politely, that you will be getting nothing.

You are not unlucky. You are the overwhelming majority.

Over two financial years, Victorian drivers lodged 1,809 claims for damage from the state's roads. Twenty-three were approved. The other 1,786 were knocked back — a rejection rate of 98 per cent. The figures were confronting enough that in August 2026 the Victorian Government ordered a review of the compensation scheme itself.

Rarely because anyone doubts the pothole was there. Almost always for one of two reasons, and neither has much to do with whether the road was in an acceptable state.

The first is a threshold. Under the Road Management Act a road authority simply is not liable for property damage at or below a set amount — $1,681 for 2026–27, lifted with inflation each year. A tyre and a rim usually land underneath it. Which means that for most people the claim was never winnable, no matter how badly the road had been let go, and the department has no power to waive that even if it wanted to.

The second is knowledge. An authority is generally only liable if it already knew about that specific defect and had a fair chance to fix it. Follow the inspection schedule set out in its own road management plan and it has a complete defence. In one case reported in August 2026, a university student's claim was refused on exactly that basis — the rule requires that stretch of road to be checked once a fortnight, and so, the department said, it had not been negligent.

Read that again, because it's the part that matters. The answer to "was this road inspected, and what did the inspector see?" rests entirely on records the public never sees. The driver has a wrecked wheel and a photo on their phone. The department has the file. There is no way for an ordinary person to test the claim, and no independent record of when that hole appeared or how long it sat there.

That asymmetry is the whole problem. It's also fixable.

Every report on this site is a photograph, a set of coordinates and a date, published openly and kept permanently. Not filed into a system that only answers to a Freedom of Information request — put somewhere anyone can look, cite and link to.

It takes about thirty seconds from the side of the road. We work out whether that street belongs to your council or to the Department of Transport, because a claim sent to the wrong one is dead before it starts. And from the moment you publish, a counter starts running: reported 3 February, still open 41 days later.

Here is the quiet power in that. If someone shreds a tyre on that pothole in March, they are no longer one person's word against a filing cabinet. There is a dated, photographed, public record showing the hole was there in February — and nobody can create that after the fact. It has to already exist.

Which means the report you file today probably won't help you. It will help whoever comes along next: the P-plater on the way to a first shift, the family towing a caravan, the nurse driving home at midnight. Someone you will never meet, who will never know your name, whose bad day you quietly made survivable.

And enough of those reports together become something else again — a public record of how long Victorian roads actually stay broken, council by council, road by road, built by the people who drive them.