The work will include shoulder widening, vegetation removal, installing a guardrail, replacing existing high visibility curve alignment markers and sealing the entry to Marys Lane.

It is expected to take five weeks to complete, weather permitting, with crews to be on-site seven days a week. It is a significant investment into the Mitchell Highway but one that is well overdue.

The work is in response to crash data that has identified a “crash cluster” along a three kilometre section of the highway at Dunkeld – data that simply confirms what has been known anecdotally for some time.

This newspaper has reported on many crashes on the highway at Dunkeld, inclduing a spate of four serious crashes within just a few months in 2014-15.

Four people were injured in a two-car crash on the corner of Dunkeld Road and the Mitchell Highway on October 19, 2014 while two women in their late 30s escaped with minor injuries after a fiery car crash at the same intersection on November 20.

Seven people were injured in a head-on collision on the Mitchell Highway at Dunkeld, less than a kilometre from the intersection of Dunkeld Road, on December 9 that same year before three men were treated for injuries following a crash involving a light commercial truck and a four-wheel drive at the Dunkeld bridge on March 10, 2015.

There have been many more since. Complicating matters, however, has been the fact that police investigations could not identify just a single cause of crash that might easily be rectified.

Speed was identified as a factor in some of the crashes with driver inattention to blame for others. These are factors that no amount of road redesigning can combat.

At last, though, there has been acknowledgment that the crash history at Dunkeld is something quite out of the ordinary and that something must be done.

But while the road upgrade is welcomed, in the end it must be the drivers who use the highway that take ultimate responsibility for their own safety and the safety of others.

It can take only a moment of inattention or one poor decision to create a tragedy on the roads. That’s the sobering message we must all take with us every time we get behind the wheel.