But our issues are not unique.

The sound of drivers’ teeth grinding and cars’ brakes screeching is heard regularly in every council area in the nation.

Part of the reason is a chronic lack of road infrastructure funding.

While motorists are tapped at every turn for money – rego fees, fuel excise, fines, tolls, taxes and rates – only a fraction of it gets ploughed back into roads.

Wagga council alone has about a $9 million annual shortfall in its roads budget.

Outside of general rates, Roads to Recovery cash and the odd grant, council has no other effective way of raising cash to keep on top of our decaying driving infrastructure.

Successive years of state government rate-capping and cost-shifting has only served to exacerbate the issue.

The result is crumbling road surfaces, frustrated drivers and very few real ways of fixing it.

Short of a massive and highly unlikely capital injection from other levels of government, our road woes can only get worse.

Naturally, council – not higher government – wears the brunt of driver frustration, some workers even reportedly copping abuse from motorists.

Much of it is misguided.

Funding constraints aside, council road crews have had to contend with three months of bucketing rain, taking a toll on road surfaces.

They must also deal with the city’s notoriously shifty clay soils, making road construction an imprecise science.

A number of RMS roads in the district are suffering a similar fate to some of our worst council roads.

We should be grateful we don’t have the traffic gridlock and infuriating commutes of major cities.

But part of the trade-off of living in the regions is the ease of getting around by car.

We should expect, and demand, better roads and more effective parking solutions.

Council must continue to find efficiencies so as much money as possible can be put into keeping on top of roads.

But you can’t put a square peg in a round hole and you can’t fix a road network without the tools to do so.

It’s time the state government equipped council with the full toolkit.