Knowledge base

Plain-language articles for council engineers, asset managers and finance officers. Each one stands alone, says what PaveKeep does about the problem including what it cannot do, and lists its sources at the foot.

Australian spelling. Every figure carries its source and year, and figures from US research are labelled as US evidence.

• An unsurveyed road is unknown, not zero — How gaps in condition data distort council road reporting — and a five-point check for your own figures.
• What a road condition survey can and can’t tell you — Every measurement has a spread. Knowing how large it is stops a council mistaking a change of rater for a change in the road.
• Most local roads are unsealed, and they fail differently — Three in five kilometres of Australian local road are unsealed. Sealed-road methods get their condition, costs and priorities wrong.
• Fix the worst first, or keep good roads good? — The road that draws the most complaints is rarely the best use of the next dollar — and the evidence for that is mostly American and decades old.
• Condition can look steady while value drains away — A condition chart says where the network is, not whether this year’s budget is keeping up with this year’s wear. Three ratios do.
• Evidence that exists before you need it — Funding bodies and auditors ask about the past. The only time to create that evidence is before anyone asks for it.
• PCI and IRI: what each measures, and why you need both — Two numbers describe the same road and disagree, and both are right. Which one answers which question.
• What a road asset management plan has to be able to prove — A plan is a document; what survives review is the evidence under it. The five things a reviewer reaches for.
• Routine, preventive, rehabilitation: three kinds of road work — Austroads names three kinds of maintenance. The middle one is what councils under pressure stop doing first.
• Putting road condition on a map — A spreadsheet of segment scores answers a question nobody in the room is asking. The question is which roads.
• How road deterioration is modelled, and what a model cannot tell you — Projecting a network ten years forward is arithmetic, not prophecy — and most councils hold two of the five inputs.
• Showing a council what a budget buys, and what the next one down costs — Condition charts do not win the budget argument. A scenario pair, with the roads named, is what changes it.