Yarra Ranges Council has moved to update its Road Management Plan, with a draft now put out for community consultation following the Tuesday 27 August council meeting.
The new plan is an update of the 2021 plan and the community is invited to give feedback until Wednesday 24 September.
Ryrie Ward councillor Fiona McAllister she’d love to say that this document is going to solve every community concern about the state of our road network, but it’s certainly part of a very complex and expensive puzzle.
“The road management plan’s intent is to, as it says very eloquently in the report, help deliver a safe and efficient road network, it’s a really critical document that I know some in our community watch very closely and refer to in conversations with me because our road network is substantial,” she said.
“One of the engineers recently told me, which I thought was an interesting fact, is it’s almost the equivalent of Melbourne to Brisbane in length so that gives you a great kind of visual representation of what we’re responsible for managing, 1755 kilometres of roads, 40 per cent of those are unsealed,”
“A big undertaking that matters hugely to our community, it’s always the number one item for focus in any community satisfaction survey we run.”
Four key changes have been proposed through the plan: using the Municipal Association of Victoria’s new rural template for road management, introducing night inspections, updated emergency protocols and removing shared paths that are outside the road reserve from the plan.
Cr McAllister said the plan outlines not just their role and responsibilities but also what community can expect in the level of service they will deliver in terms of inspections, proactive maintenance, reactive maintenance and a range of things.
“Adoption of a hybrid approach, looking at both the MAV rural templates and the urban templates, is recognising we have a foot in both and we absolutely have a road network in both, with very different demands and a very different need for response from us as a council,” she said.
“Adjustments that have also been made, just to name a few which again are worth pausing to reflect on whether they are well aligned with what we need in terms of maintenance and management of our network include thresholds around potholes, edge breaks and I think depressions might have been the other language in it,”
“Recognition of connectivity with footpaths, new defects and even night inspections which is interesting because again, thinking through the difference of needs around visibility and maintenance of roads that are much travelled at night.”
It is a legal requirement for the council’s road management plan to be updated every four years and within 12 months of the last council election.
Billanook Ward councillor Tim Heenan said after losing such a wad of money (Roads for Community funding) a couple of years ago, the council had to start to think differently about how they’re going to look at roads.
“It won’t be one size fits all and certainly it’s just a mammoth, mammoth task with what we have in Yarra Ranges,” he said.
“I appreciate the way in which the team has actually created this document so that it can be presented out in the public… one of the tendencies I’ve seen sometimes with council documents is that it tends to be more like a marketing exercise than it is a policy document,”
“We have the long-term considerations presented here which given the impact of climate change we must consider as well as the more immediate concerns of our community so I think that balance has been struck very well and it reads well and we should get some good feedback from the community.”
Residents can provide their feedback on the plan by visiting shaping.yarraranges.vic.gov.au/draft-road-management-plan-2025.
