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:
Engagement activity
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.
We are proposing the following changes to our RMP 2025. Learn more in our survey below, and share your feedback by 28 May 2025.
Engagement outcomes
We engaged on this project in April-May 2025 and received:
- 13 contributions from 170 visits to the Engage Frankston page.
- From
the 13 contributions, sentiment was:
- Positive (with 55% support) towards the proposal to apply a single timeframe for all reactive inspections of two days. Respondents generally provided constructive feedback after carefully thinking through the change. Several comments indicated that it would be reasonable for Council to extend out the 2 days timeframe to perhaps 3 days.
- Mixed towards the change to move the maintenance of underground drainage pits and unrelated vegetation into separate plans. While 33% of responses indicate the community are ok with the vegetation/drainage issues being removed from the RMP, the 33% of ‘mixed responses’ would like more clarity on how these issues will be managed.
There was a general spread of respondents across suburbs, however there were more older male respondents than other age groups and genders, and minimal respondents with unique identifiers (such as disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, LGBTIQA+). Council will focus on how we better reach these groups for future road-based engagements, and has undertaken a GIA to inform how Council delivers road management services that are accessible to all demographics.
We used this feedback to:
- Finalise the RMP, including:
- Updating the document to incorporate as much as the Municipal Association Victoria (MAV) Insurance Template as possible, where appropriate.
- The proposed single timeframe for all reactive inspections of two days (see updated Attachment 2 in the final RMP). This change was supported by MAV, internal staff and community.
- Moving the maintenance of underground drainage pits and unrelated vegetation into separate plans. This change was supported by MAV, internal staff and one-third of community responses. Council believes it can respond to community requests for the other plans to be clear about how these issues will be managed, in the separate plans.