The development of standards for the restoration of rural roads

With the ever decreasing funds being allocated to road works, keeping up with the maintenance and upgrading of existing rural roads to meet modern demands is becoming increasingly difficult for road authorities. In an endeavour to maximise road improvements without seriously sacrificing safety standards, the Department of Main Roads has developed a Road Design standard which, it hopes, will achieve a reasonable design enabling greater lengths of road to be upgraded than would otherwise be the case and at the same time meet the expectation of the motorist. The paper describes the approaches that were taken to modify the usual design practices in order to reduce costs. An example is used where the new Restoration Standard is compared with the normal NAASRA standard (A).