Chris Oldfield, Naracoorte Community News

When crunching numbers about whether to seal a road, the cost should be spread over 60 years “or as long as possible”.

Australian Road Research Board Chief Technology Leader, Asset Performance Tyrone Toole said it would be pointless to only spread the cost over 10 years.

“I tend to run numbers for as long as I can, and the way we do the calculations, that is not a problem,” Mr Toole said.

“When you’ve got a sealed road, it’s going to last 60 years, and if you only run it over for say 10 years, 80 – 85 per cent of its life is unconsumed, and yet you’ve paid the cost.

“So, you should really match your analyses with the life of your asset.”

Mr Toole said the “other calculation we do is calculate the benefits”.

“If you’ve done this big spend up front, you won’t capture the benefits if you only look short term, you really want to do it long term,” he said.

“That calculation is also very easy to do.

“At the end of the day we always come back to the bang for the buck in terms of value looking forward.”

Mr Toole said sometimes there were high cost upgrades that if a road was to pay for itself, it would require 500 vehicles a day.

“But as mentioned earlier, I’ve sealed roads at 50, and 100 vehicles a day and they have been economical,” he said.

“So it does vary and in any of the calculations, you have to make sure you’ve got the numbers in the first place.”

Part of the calculation also included traffic movements during different seasons.

Mr Toole believed heavy traffic movements during the harvest, shearing and hay making seasons needed to be spread out over the year, including winter when there were few traffic movements.

Additionally, the calculation would include factors such as low winter traffic, because the road would “probably last longer with no traffic during the wet season”.

A calculation would also include terrain, weather and soil types.

But Mr Toole said the biggest thing would be the quality of the gravels and whether or not they would stand up to become dusty and dry.

And, when doing calculations, he said: “Don’t just do an average”.

“We don’t like averages because it means you are 50 per cent wrong half the time,” Mr Toole said.

Regarding regional road groups, Mr Toole said there was a lot to be gained from such gatherings.

He said while a proper analysis needed to be done before roads were downgraded, Mr Toole believed it also helped for councils to get together and share their problems and solutions.

Additionally, someone with road expertise could assess the roads of an entire region of councils.

Mr Toole said there were examples of that happening in some regions, and “this can be very beneficial”.

This article appeared in Naracoorte Community News.

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