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Councils urged to seek expert help

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Chris Oldfield, Naracoorte Community News

When it comes to roads, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ and it is a lot cheaper for councils to look after them, says one of Australia’s leading road research experts, Tyrone Toole.

Only in very poor countries has Mr Toole seen bitumen roads ripped up and replaced with gravel ones.

Additionally, in Africa he has seen instances of some roads being downgraded or deleted from maps – then lost completely.

But for councils to do such things in Australia, Mr Toole said it would be a sign of “desperation” and “a backwards measure”.

He has urged councils involved in such downgrades to seek expert help.

Currently the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) Chief Technology Leader, Asset Performance, Mr Toole has spent a lifetime building and researching roads around the world.

His long list of experience and skills include a Masters of Civil Engineering and he is also ARRB’s portfolio leader of asset modelling.

Additionally, Mr Toole is the main author of the Federal Government’s Best Practice Guide for Unsealed Roads – a manual for councils.

Regarding the guide for unsealed roads, Mr Toole said it was “only a guide”, and there were a variety of different conditions to consider regarding roads in various areas and regions.

The guide suggested a road use of 200 cars a day before a road was bituminised.

But it was a guide and Mr Toole said he had recommended roads to be sealed with only 50 vehicles a day.

“Sometimes, it is actually cheaper to convert them into a sealed road than to keep on going back every few years to reshape a weakened surface,” he said.

Mr Toole said he would not recommend a sealed road be ripped up and replaced with gravel and that would not be found in ARRB guidelines.

“If that happens the community is going to be up in arms and that is not desirable,” he said.

“The key is, why should they (roads) get to that point in the first place?

“I tend to use the old adage, `stitch in time saves nine’.

“If you treat sealed roads appropriately – and farm access tracks are that which could be sealed as well – then you shouldn’t get to that position that you’re reverting it back to gravel.

“That is quite a severe thing to do.

“You will not see much guidance on reverting back to gravel.”

If a council invested in a sealed road in the first place, Mr Toole said the expectation “would be to do your reseals, do your patching, do your rejuvenating the surface with an emulsion, but like a weatherboard house, look after it. Don’t neglect it”.

“It should be cheaper to look after it than neglecting it and reverting it to gravel. That’s going backward.

“I don’t come across any of these cases here in Australia where anyone has needed to revert to gravel.”

Limestone a good base for roads

Mr Toole said a limestone base for a sealed road was likely to perform much better than other road bases, such as clay.

He said the limestone was like chalk but much better. “When you mix it up with water and make a kind of paste, you get a very firm, well bound surface if you seal it”.

“It can perform better – and it’s because of that, the way the paste builds up when you mix it with water and the gravely parts of the limestone – it really binds together very well.

“I’ve got a history of working with those kinds of materials all over the world and usually they’re on the better side of performance.”

He believed if community elders noticed the limestone-based roads performed better, it was probably true.

Mr Toole said a road might be designed for 20 years, “but it will last up to 50- 60 years and even longer – if it is cared for”.

“If you reseal it with what we call a chip seal – if the traffic is not enormous or heavy, it will just keep on lasting even longer.”

He said single lane bitumen roads “called mats” were proving to be a management problem in some parts of Victoria.

“With the wind farm developments and the forestry development, they are being hammered with traffic they were never designed to care for,” Mr Toole said.

“As soon as you go up in traffic levels, from both a safety point of view and an asset preservation point of view, it becomes economic to widen and strengthen.

“It’s not your occasional farming vehicles and supplies … and seasonal traffic.

“It is more regular heavy use and you really have to then get out and do some calculations.”

Councils should get expert advice

Mr Toole said a council should be procuring advice before downgrading any roads or turning sealed roads into gravel ones.

“It will be a road by road analysis, and I would say it’s an analysis that needs to be done,” he said.

“It doesn’t have to be with me or ARRB, but it needs to be done.

“A council should be procuring advice – and many councils have done this – to find what should be their strategy going forward,” Mr Toole said.

“What minimises the cost to the community? – the physical costs, not just the wear and tear on the vehicles.

“Now, the councils will say we’ve got budget constraints, we’ve only got a third of the money, how do you do that?”

But that was where State and Federal Governments were also part of the analysis.

“So, I would say an analysis needs to be done, and many councils have done it – perhaps not so many in the rural areas though,” Mr Toole said.

“Road conditions affect productivity on farms, it affects the profitability of all these different enterprises, as well as the community itself.

“So do the analysis.”

Naracoorte Community News 13 April 2022

This article appeared in the Naracoorte Community News.

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