# 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

- **Write down the unsurveyed length as a number**, and carry it into the plan as
  part of the risk the council is holding. It belongs in the budget papers, not
  in a footnote.
- **Record vendor, equipment and rating method with every survey from now on.**
  It costs nothing at the time and it is unrecoverable later.

## 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

- Austroads (2025), *Guide to Pavement Technology Part 5: Pavement Evaluation and
  Treatment Design* — the rehabilitation design inputs (§3.2), roughness
  measurement and the NAASRA–IRI correlation (§4).
- LGAM, *Pavement Condition Assessment Manual*, based on the Bundaberg Regional
  Council Road Condition Assessment Manual — the PCI and SCI weightings by
  segment type.
- Australian Local Government Association (2024), *National State of the Assets
  Report 2024* — the sealed and unsealed network lengths, the $250bn replacement
  cost, and the poor-condition shares and replacement costs quoted above; and the
  accompanying *Technical Report* for the 678,000 km total and its 77% share of
  the national network.
- The NSW Integrated Planning and Reporting framework is established under the
  *Local Government Act 1993* (NSW); this article does not quote its guidance
  material.

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Source: https://pavekeep.com.au/knowledge/what-an-asset-plan-must-prove · PaveKeep · bound content