Hello to all.

Sorry it has been a while since my last newsletter from www.unsealedroads.com a web site all about managing unsealed road networks on limited budgets.

I was reviewing an recent article that you might be interested in. Click on the below link to review this article.

Road sign ruling could hit councils
The West Australian - Perth,Western Australia,Australia
The shire had around 1600km of unsealed roads within its boundaries. Judge Eaton said that if there had been a warning sign, Mr Cooper would have driven ...
 

This brings up an interesting issue that isn't easy to solve. Here are some of my thoughts.

Councils with large unsealed roads networks would find it hard to maintain 100% wet weather access over their whole network.  This would mean that they would have to ensure that they maintain a gravel pavement (resheeting) over poorer natural materials at all time. What would this cost?

For example, in the above article lets make some assumptions.

• Gravel loss =20mm/year
• Resheeting Depth =100mm
• Years Gravel Lasts = 5 years

70% of the network requires a gravel pavement to give good wet weather access, that would mean maintaining 1120km of gravel pavements (1600*0.7).

Resheeting Budget Amount = 1120km/5yr =224km/year

Resheeting Budget Expenditure/yr = 224 x $20,000= $4.48M.   This is a huge budget, which I think would be unrealistic. I wonder what this Council is actually spending on resheeting!

So if we can only maintain a low % of wet weather access roads because of limited funds are we going to have to sign all our roads?

Regards,

Darren Shepherd
BE Civil RPEQ
Mobile 0402166325