Ararat Rural City Council I Vincent St Ararat I Ph. 03 5355 0200 www.ararat.vic.gov.au Rural Roads Renewal Council has altered work practices and design standards to ensure roads are built to Austroads guidelines including increasing pavement thickness, utilising certified crushed rock and adopting construction methods that will ensure investment in roads is not lost due to re-work. Ararat Rural City Council manages approximately 700 kilometres of sealed roads and 1,350 kilometres of unsealed gravel roads. In addition to this, there are about 300 kilometres of natural surface roads. Annually, Council spends on average between $3.9M and $4.0M on renewal and upgrade. Rural roads are increasingly required to manage the transport task associated with B-Double and Higher Mass Limit Vehicles in support of the agricultural sector and associated supporting businesses. The sector’s reliance on transport to receive inputs and to dispatch produce is growing. The productivity gains associated with heavy transport, and in particular permit based vehicles, requires last mile access to the farm gate. This adds to the cost of managing the road network when consideration is given to the standards roads were originally constructed to and the rate at which they are consumed. Roads within the municipality have historically been constructed from naturally occurring surface gravels which lack strength and durability. Roads are often narrow including those with single lane seal. Where road reconstruction and renewal has been undertaken using natural gravels these roads have failed prematurely and well within the effective life expected from asset management planning. In response to this, Ararat Rural City Council has altered work practices and design standards to ensure roads are built to Austroads guidelines including increasing pavement thickness, utilising certified crushed rock and adopting construction methods that will ensure investment in roads is not lost due to re-work. These changes have been implemented with operational efficiencies resulting in costs being constrained despite overall construction costs increasing. Increases of contracted works have been significantly greater. Currently Council’s operational staff are delivering road construction work at between 55% and 75% of the cost of the commercial sector. We are also trialling the use of stabilising agents to extend the life and performance of unsealed roads constructed from natural gravel. Council has recently committed to a broad scale community engagement process to develop a strategic transport network with the aim of focusing resources to those roads that provide the most benefit to the community. An outcome associated with this could be a reduction in service standards to minor roads with some roads being allowed to return to natural surface and becoming dry weather access only roads. This has some potential to reduce Council’s renewal liability. May 2018