Record flood events around the country have left our roads in tatters and governments in a quandry as to how best to fix the problem. National Transport Research Organisation's CEO Michael Caltibiano shares his thoughts on how to make things better
Australia’s road network has been devastated these last few years, as any road transport worker will attest. The presence of La Nina on the East coast of the country has resulted in an unprecedented amount of rainfall.
These rains and the lingering moisture and wetness they create are considered to be the enemies of the road network for the type of materials commonly used to build roads in Australia.
Michael Caltabiano, CEO of the National Transport Research Organisation (NTRO) explains why this is the case.
“This unseasonal high and consistent rainfall has not given the roads the chance to dry out,” Caltabiano says
“The roads we’ve built in Australia operate best when moisture content is low. High moisture weakens the road structure, and the roads ultimately fall apart.
“The stress on the roads has led to extensive road failures.”
Under normal conditions the roads are designed to be able to withstand some wetting and then recover once they dry up again. After three years of La Nina, however, many roads throughout south-eastern Australia have not held up and the nation is currently dealing with a crisis within the road network.
Roads everywhere are riddled with potholes. In some areas entire sections have been washed away. This has severely affected the freight industry, particularly road freight.
Caltabiano says, however, that the current road failures crisis isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault, as the recent weather events are so extreme that no one would originally plan for them. Australia is also, he points out, under a lot of pressure to deliver cost effective road surfaces.
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Michael Caltabiano.
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“As a big country we’re really good at building cost effective road systems. These are not used in many other places around the world so extensively.
“When we build back, we need to do so in a much more resilient way. We need to reimagine the materials that go into our roads,” says Caltabiano.
Caltabiano also says more resilient roads can be built with existing technology for around 10 per cent extra investment.
The other aspect to a more effective future road network in a time of increased extreme weather events is an updated maintenance schedule.
“The cycle of regular ordinary maintenance must increase. We need to massively change the cycle.
“Summer and winter rains are now falling in volumes we’ve never seen before,”
Caltabiano says.
Caltabiano also contends that a very simple design improvement can help to alleviate water damage and improve the road driving experience for heavy vehicles as well.
“We need to widen the roads with bigger shoulders,” he says.
“An extra one metre of shoulder of our roads will quadruple the time it takes for water to get in underneath the bitumen seals in the travelling lane.
“The added benefit of wider shoulders is that it improves the safety of truck drivers as they can use the extra space to pass and move over to allow safer journeys for all road users.
“It helps the freight task enormously to have wider and better sealed roads. As well as helping to improve the weather resiliency”.
While it might be tempting to imagine that some newly invented road materials or high tech maintenance solutions will be the answer to the roads crisis, the reality is we have the technology available right now to be addressing the problem.
Caltabiano says it is just up to councils and states to begin implementing it.
“The technologies are there, it’s the application that is the missing piece needed”.
This recent crisis in the road network is also bringing attention back to a larger issue that the transport industry has been demanding for a long time, which is the need for an all-weather freight route across the country.
An all-weather freight route is a national road route that can be guaranteed to be accessible by heavy vehicles all year round no matter the weather. Resistant to extreme rain and flooding events. To ensure that isolated communities around the country can have access to products in times of crisis.
This is the often-forgotten reason why the freight task is so important in Australia, says Caltabiano.
“Economic corridors are the lifeblood of this country, they also connect communities.
“You can’t have communities isolated by flood events because roads are down for weeks and months on end. It’s incredibly isolating.
“We’re a much more sophisticated society today compared to 100 years ago and we’re heavily dependent on the freight task,” Caltabiano says.
It’s not just the road freight task that is struggling due to La Nina though, the rail network, for example is also dealing with materials and infrastructure that cannot handle the stress of constant exposure to extreme weather.
“The rail sector is in the same position as the road sector, they have very old infrastructure built to standards from 100 years ago”
Overall, the solution will not be any short term, band aid type solution but a whole new approach to the problem generally.
“There’s going to be a re-thinking and re-imagining of the freight task in Australia,” Caltabiano says.
“The way in which we consider and fund the freight task may very well change in the medium term.”