NMC replaced informal, knowledge-based decisions with a consistent way to prioritise upgrades across Cardinia’s 865km unsealed road network.
Cardinia Shire Council manages 865km of unsealed roads, spread across two starkly different regions that create distinct challenges: flooding in the flat south, and steep terrain in the hilly north that renders many assets unmaintainable under standard upkeep. These unmaintainable roads need capital investment or upgrading to bring them into a manageable maintenance cycle, but with such a large network, Council had no formal process for deciding where that investment should go.
Instead, it was relying on local knowledge from its maintenance crew to decide which roads got upgraded first and what upgrade they received. Without a defined, defensible process behind those decisions, it became increasingly difficult for Council to explain to the community why one road was upgraded while another was left waiting, and Cardinia engaged NMC to fix that.
NMC took a holistic approach, looking at how unsealed assets could be better managed across four key areas: maintenance, capital investment, data capture, and advocacy and engagement with community and government. This started with an evaluation of Cardinia’s historical approach across each area to identify the gaps previous initiatives had missed. From there, NMC went out with the civil maintenance team to document unsealed road case studies from across the shire, building a picture of the common challenges around road characteristics, drainage infrastructure, road usage and local conditions.
This groundwork confirmed that not every road was suited to the same style of upgrade, something that needed to be considered when the framework was developed.
