# Load the road network

*Whose job: the engineer. You should see roads, lines and segments appear; the import is listed in the ledger.*

## What you are doing

You are telling PaveKeep which roads the council is responsible for, and where they run. It is the first thing you do and the only step that must happen before any other.

This is usually the job of whoever holds the council's spatial data — an asset engineer, a GIS officer, sometimes the same person who maintains the road register. It is NOT the surveyor's job: they record what condition the roads are in, which is a different question and a later step. If the file has to be requested from somebody else, request it before you start rather than part-way through.

## What PaveKeep does with it

Each road in your file becomes a road in PaveKeep, with one or more lines under it — a line is a carriageway, so a divided road has two — and each line is cut into segments of roughly eight metres. The segments are the unit everything later attaches to: a condition score, a photograph, a recommended treatment, a completed job.

Your own asset number is carried in unchanged and kept. That is what lets a second, corrected file update the roads you already have instead of duplicating them, and it is what lets a figure in PaveKeep be traced back to the row in your own register.

Nothing is scored. A network that has been loaded and not surveyed reports as unknown condition, never as zero and never as an average — which is the point, and it is what step 6 is about.

## What it will not do

- **The method** — A road's shape is not its condition. This step tells PaveKeep where the roads are and says nothing about what state they are in. The map stays uncoloured until a survey is loaded, and that is correct rather than broken.
- **The product** — Roads are matched on your own asset number. A file that carries none cannot be matched, so a second upload of it creates a second set of roads rather than updating the first. The number of features with no key is reported after every import rather than hidden, so you can see whether this applies to you.
- **What you have not got yet** — A road that is in PaveKeep and missing from a newer file is left alone. Retiring a road is a decision somebody makes, not something an import may infer from an omission — so removing a road from your export does not remove it here.
- **Your role** — Loading the network needs the network-editing capability. An analyst or a surveyor can see the result and cannot do this step; if the button is not there, it is somebody else's job rather than a missing feature.

## How you know it worked

**Before:** a council with an account and no roads.

**Do:** on the Import Data screen, Road Network (GeoJSON), choose your file.

**After:** the screen reports how many roads, lines and segments it created, and the network appears on the map, uncoloured. The Imports tab lists what you just loaded, with your name against it.

**If it was the wrong file**, there are three ways back and which one you need depends only on how late you notice. If it was simply out of date, upload the corrected file — roads are matched on your own asset number, so it updates rather than duplicates. If nothing has been recorded against it yet, remove the network. If a surveyor has already recorded condition against it, void the import from the Imports tab: its roads leave the network and nothing is deleted — every observation and completed job stays on the record.

**Hand to:** the person who will record condition. They need the network to exist before their spreadsheet has anywhere to land.

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**If it went in wrong:** this step can be undone, and the undoing stays on the record rather than erasing what happened.

A council reads these same four sections inside PaveKeep, beside the screen that does the work — the same sentences, held to the same source in both languages.

[← Find out what you are allowed to do](/how-it-works/access-what-you-may-do) · [Load condition →](/how-it-works/condition-chainage) · [All 13 steps](/how-it-works)

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Source: https://pavekeep.com.au/how-it-works/network-import · PaveKeep · derived content