Our Process

If you need a traffic report, safe-system audit, travel plan, to move an over-dimension load or you have otherwise been advised you need input from a traffic engineer, please start by contacting our principal engineer – Dean Scanlen and discuss your needs with him. Dean will evaluate what is necessary to achieve your desired outcomes and often outline the information we need to enable this. We will evaluate the available information and data, ask any necessary further questions then provide you with a formal proposal including our costs, timeframe and “deliverables” (what we intend to provide to you).

Once we are engaged on a project, we will give you updates at suitable times and, usually, an initial report on what we have found and what we recommend. This will be informed by a combination of our analysis and/or preliminary design work, the applicable standards or rules, our previous experience with similar situations (especially how receptive the applicable authority was) and/or the likely consequences of adopting alternative pathways towards your goals. 

For example, it is almost always easier to obtain consent by simply offering all of the relevant standards, but this is rarely the most cost-effective pathway. A reduced standard that is still adequate, especially in terms of “effects”, is usually more cost effective but carries greater risks of pushback from consent authority staff and consequent delays. Our assessments of reduced standards are an important basis for challenges to consent authority standards and/or decisions if you decide this is in your best interests. To ensure the option of a challenge is at least available to you, our conclusions are always based on careful and rigorous investigation and never influenced by how the authority’s staff might react.

Common examples of reduced standards we commonly evaluate include narrower roads or accesses than are specified or the avoidance of local widening at access connection points.

Once we are settled on what we are all comfortable with, we finalise our report and send it to you and other experts you have engaged to help you through the process (often an RMA planner). We can also send our reports directly to consent authorities, but will only ever do so with your blessing and with your full knowledge of what it recommends and commits you to.