PaveKeep Sign in
Knowledge base

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. Here is what an auditor, a funding body or a councillor actually reaches for, and what usually is not there.

Every NSW council produces asset management plans under the Integrated Planning and Reporting framework, and councils in every other state produce their equivalents. The documents get written. What varies enormously is whether the numbers in them can be followed back to anything.

The networks involved are not small. ALGA's 2024 National State of the Assets report puts the local road network at 265,000 km sealed and 413,000 km unsealed — 678,000 km in all, around 77% of Australia's total road network by length, and 61% of it unsealed — with a combined replacement cost of $250 billion. Nine per cent of sealed roads and 13% of unsealed roads are in poor condition, worth $19.2 billion and $3.9 billion to replace respectively.

Those are the figures a plan is arguing about. The only part that matters under scrutiny is whether its own numbers can be followed back to anything. A plan that says the sealed network averages 62 and needs $14 million over ten years is making two claims, and a reviewer will test them in the same order every time: where did 62 come from, and what turns 62 into $14 million.

The five things a reviewer reaches for

1. Which roads the number covers. An average over the roads that were surveyed is not an average over the network. If 10% of the network has never been inspected, there are two honest ways to report it and one dishonest one. State the average over the surveyed length and the unsurveyed length separately. Or state the coverage beside the average. The dishonest one is to present the first as though it were the second — which is what a spreadsheet does by default.

A blank is not a zero either. Scoring an unsurveyed road as zero makes the network look worse than anyone knows it to be and puts roads nobody has looked at at the top of the works programme.

2. When each road was last looked at, and by what method. A rating from 2019 is evidence of something; a rating with no date is evidence of nothing. And the method matters as much as the date. Australian roughness data has been collected both by response-type devices reporting NAASRA counts and by inertial laser profilometers reporting IRI, and Austroads publishes a correlation between them rather than an identity (Guide to Pavement Technology Part 5, 2025). A step in a trend at the year a council changed vendor or method is a change of instrument. If nothing records which method produced each survey, that step is indistinguishable from deterioration.

3. Which index, and whose weighting. A pavement condition index is the output of a formula somebody chose. The LGAM Pavement Condition Assessment Manual, derived from Bundaberg Regional Council's manual, publishes weightings that differ between urban, rural and short urban segments — roughness carries far more of a rural PCI than an urban one. Two councils can both report "PCI" and mean measurably different things. A plan that names the index and the weighting is making a checkable statement; one that reports a bare number is not.

4. What turns condition into cost. The unit rates, the treatment rules, the thresholds at which a road becomes a candidate. These are usually the least documented part of a plan and the most consequential: they are what converts a survey into a dollar figure. A reviewer who cannot see them cannot check the dollar figure, and a reviewer who cannot check the dollar figure discounts it.

5. What the plan assumed and what it measured. Austroads' own treatment design process (Part 5, 2025) starts from original pavement design, construction details, maintenance and rehabilitation records, climate and the effect of traffic on past performance. Most councils hold some of that and not all of it. Saying which is which is not a weakness in a plan — it is the difference between a projection and a guess, and a reviewer can tell anyway.

The pattern underneath all five

Each one is the same request in a different costume: show the chain from the figure back to the observation.

Survey → score → rule → cost → programme. A plan that can walk a reader down that chain for any line in it will survive almost any review. A plan that cannot will be believed exactly as far as the author is trusted, which is a fragile place to put a ten-year capital argument.

It is also, usefully, a chain that can be built before anyone asks for it. The only time to create evidence about what a road looked like last year is last year.

Two things worth doing before the next plan

How PaveKeep handles this

PaveKeep was built around that chain. Every figure it produces can be traced back to the survey it came from, the setting that shaped it and the arithmetic that produced it, and it is able to show the network as it stood on any past date — which is what an auditor or a funding body asks for when a claim is reopened. A road nobody has surveyed is reported as unknown, never as zero and never quietly averaged away.

What it does not yet do: survey records do not carry the vendor, equipment or rating method, so point 2 above is a habit it supports in your own records rather than one it enforces.

PaveKeep produces the packs a council files; each funding body's current rules and forms still govern what must be submitted. It is built for small and regional councils and is not yet in use at any council.

Sources