Road maintenance

Our pothole program is based on calls from customers, reports by Councillors and our regular reviews of the roads. We also have a roads inspector who travels our road network regularly and reports on pothole locations, size and associated risk.

The information that comes in from the public is really important. The more data we have the better we can manage our road network to ensure it is safe for our community.

You can submit information on potholes here.

Across Port Stephens, we have 56km (out of a total of 720km) of gravel roads.

Gravel roads are cheaper to maintain and have significantly less traffic volumes than our sealed roads and generally service rural or semi-rural locations.

The sealing of a gravel road is considered an upgrade and is generally driven by housing development. The cost of a home in a new development will contribute to the upfront cost of sealing a road, which is undertaken by the developer. Once it is sealed, it moves under Council’s maintenance program.

For our existing gravel road maintenance, we undertake three levels of gravel road maintenance:

Level 1: Complete gravel re-sheet

This is where the entire road is re-gravelled, re-shaped, drains reinstated, culverts cleaned and you essentially have a “new” gravel road.

Level 2: Proactive maintenance grading

This is a proactive scheduled program where the grader, roller and water cart grade the full length of each road in turn. They undertake limited drainage works and they may add a truckload or two of gravel to ‘top up’ the worst sections.

The number of maintenance grades each road receives per year is based on a traffic volume. This is efficient and effective as the grading crew is located in one area for a period of time and can fully address all the roads in that area before moving to the next area.

Level 3: Reactive response maintenance

This is a reactive risk based activity where roads are inspected more frequently (generally after a storm event) and the priority of works is continually revised and reprioritised.

On this basis, the higher use heavier trafficked through roads (eg 6 Mile, East Seaham) get prioritised over the lower use roads.

Similar to a cold mix pothole repair, it’s less efficient and only addresses the priority issues however, due to the severe weather we’ve had over the past 18 months or more, we’ve been in a revolving Level 3, reactive state with little opportunity to re-establish a Level 2 proactive program or undertake selected Level 1 gravel resheets.

We’re aware of the condition of our gravel roads and have increased our inspection schedule in response.

Due to the weather and budgetary constraints, we’ll continue in a reactive risk based approach, attending to priority failures only.

When the weather improves significantly, we’ll be able to return to a proactive schedule maintenance grading program.

We have a maintenance contract with the NSW Government to maintain this road and there are certain conditions associated with it. This includes mowing and weed spraying, which is only approved to be undertaken at specific times on weekends due to traffic volumes through the week.

There’s no cost to Council for this maintenance work on Nelson Bay Road – it's fully funded by the NSW Government.

We invest more than $1.6M into the management and maintenance of our road networks each year. We have a rolling schedule of road maintenance and although we’d love to reseal about 10% of our networks every year, we do less than 2% due to resourcing.

Our budget doesn’t allow us to fix everything and we do our best to direct our roads maintenance program to the area of most need.

Keeping roads up to modern standards is an ongoing task faced by many councils around the state.

Yes, all the time. Grant funding from State and Federal Governments is generally for the replacement of roads and over the years, Council has been very successful in receiving grants for road rehabilitation and road resealing.

Many of our roads across Port Stephens were designed and built at a time where Port Stephens was much smaller with much less traffic volume than it has today.

Some of our roads have been built without the right drainage, others have a very low quality subgrade (the materials that make up the base of the road), some are built on moving sand and others through old river beds and some have all of the above features!

If we were to start again, we wouldn’t build the roads in the same place or use the same materials. But, we know this is not an option and so we need to make the best of what we have.

The way we prioritise our road repairs and maintenance can be easy likened to how you maintain a house.

Sometimes, you often have minor home maintenance to attend to – a leaking tap, a bump in the wall, a cracked window. These are the small and quick repairs that you know if you stay on top of, you’ll avoid more expensive and time consuming repairs down the track.

This is similar to a pothole patch. When potholes occur, we need to fix them as soon as possible so they don’t turn into larger problems. We know this is a temporary fix but fully resealing every road where potholes occur needs more money, time and resourcing.

We plan for this and know that in the long term it will help protect our roads and increase their lifespan.

This is similar to the way you would plan to repaint your house every 15 years or so.

Our road reseal schedule occurs every 10 to 15 years and in between, we undertake a patch here and there to keep the roads safe and drivable.

Sometimes, it looks like we are resealing a road that has nothing wrong with it and in some instances this is correct. But, just like your house, we don’t want to wait until there is something wrong with it. We know that if we reseal our roads every 10-15 years, we’ll keep them in better condition and reduce costs down the track.

After 20 years in your home, you might need to start to think about doing some serious maintenance like replacing gutters or rebuilding a deck. A paint job won’t fix these problems and we don’t want them to get worse. This is similar to when we heavy patch larger sections of a road.

After 30 years in your house it might be time for a full renovation – the bones are still good, but it’s time for a major overhaul. It’s expensive, but still cheaper than a new house. This can be compared to the rehabilitation of the road pavement where we not only fix the top layers but also work on the subgrade and improve what’s underneath the road.

Finally, after 40 years of living in your home it might be time to consider a knock down and rebuild. For our road network, this equates to a full reconstruction and will include drainage, road widening and pedestrian access improvements.

Pothole repairs and heavy patches are prioritised based on the level of risk they pose.

Road rehabilitation and upgrades are prioritised by the condition of the pavement, the age and the use of the road.

Sometimes, we have to change our schedule to accommodate a new project due to a specific grant program.

For a significant development, the upgrade of the road network is a condition of the development consent. This means that the developer is responsible for the costs associated with the upgrades required to support the increase in traffic for the development.

Council provides very specific criteria regarding the type of road pavement required for the development.

Examples of developer funded road upgrades include the current roadworks at the Harvey Norman development at Taylors Beach.

There’s a lot that goes into a road pavement. Apart from what we see on the surface, there are layers of construction underneath the road that require proper attention to minimise the need for future road repairs.

When working on roads, we also need to maintain traffic flow which takes time and slows down the process.

When we build a road, you can compare the process to painting raw timber. After painting the first coat we need to let it dry before coming back to paint the second layer – to allow the second coat to bond to the first. The first layer is also wetter than the others – we have to let it bond and dry out.

Once dry, we let a new road settle out to make sure we haven’t missed any failures or spots to fix. Similar to paintwork – before it’s finalised, you find those bubbles and missed spots and fix them.