What is the Road Management Plan?
The Frankston City Road Management Plan outlines the process to ensure Council's roads, bridges, kerbs, and roadside footpaths are safe and in good condition. As required under the Road Management Act 2004, we’re required to review our Road Management Plan every 4 years following Council elections.
In our 2025 review, we’ve analysed Council’s current service delivery and have drafted a revised Road Management Plan 2025. We’re seeking community feedback on the draft plan before presenting it to Council for adoption in May 2025.
How does Council currently manage its roads and footpaths?
Council aims to deliver a safe and efficient road network and meet community needs to the best of our ability, within available resources. Our network includes roads, footpaths, shared paths, kerb and channel, local area traffic management, bridges, and street signage.
All roads and footpaths within Council's network are classified under a hierarchy based on how they are used, who uses them and how often. The hierarchy is used to prioritise maintenance and responses to defect/hazard reports, and is summarised as follows.
- Major roads
- Provide 'through traffic' routes between major commercial, industrial and residential area
- Have high/moderate heavy vehicle and bus use
- Collector roads
- Provide local traffic access to shops, schools, commercial districts, hospitals, sporting and other local facilities.
- Have low/moderate heavy vehicle and bus use
- Industrial roads
- Local access roads
- Laneway/right of way
- Frankston City centre roads
- Service roads
- Unsealed roads
- Frankston City Centre footpaths
- Cater for high to medium volume pedestrian traffic with diverse needs.
- Key access footpaths
- Provide direct access to shopping and service precincts, transport hubs, schools, preschools, recreational facilities, parks, community centres, childcare centres tourist attractions, religious centres, hospitals, facilities for seniors, and other public attractions.
- Cater for high to medium pedestrian traffic volumes with diverse needs.
- Industrial access footpaths
- Located within industrial precincts
- Withstand heavy vehicles
- Reserve footpaths
- Located within Council open space reserves, including the Foreshore.
- Cater for variable volumes of pedestrian traffic.
- Local Access footpaths
- Mostly servicing suburban residential areas.
- Cater for low volume pedestrian traffic with diverse needs
Since July 2021, Council has conducted 43,200 inspections of roads, paths, drainage pits and roadside vegetation, resulting in:
What are the proposed changes to the Road Management Plan?
Council has reviewed its current RMP in our Draft Road Management Review Report 2025. This report identifies a number of ways that our draft new RMP 2025 can be improved to:
- Better meet community expectations and needs:
- We have analaysed Council's Community Satisfaction Survey results 2015-2024. While survey results suggest that the community is generally satisfied with Council's current management of roads and footpaths, we know the community would like response times to be faster.
- We have analysed outcomes of related community engagement projects, including our Bike Riding Strategy, Safe Community Strategy, Flood Mapping and Coastal Hazard Management Plan and Integrated Transport Strategy. In particular, our Road Safety Strategy in 2024 highlighted community safety concerns on intersections, footpaths, shared paths, and a need for more maintenance of overgrown roadside vegetation, damaged infrastructure, potholes and uneven surfaces.
- Be more consistent with neighbouring Councils' RMPs:
- Unlike other Councils, our current RMP includes management of vegetation and drainage, even when they don't relate specifically to roads and footpaths. Other Councils also have more consistent reactive inspection times, instead of varying these based on the type of defect/hazard.
- Be more streamlined:
- We have analysed the proposed new RMP template provided by the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV), and believe it will help Council to deliver road management services more efficiently. In particular, RMP delivery can be more streamlined by focusing Council's efforts on the risks to our community from roads, path, kerbs and bridges, rather than also including general maintenance of vegetation and drains.