Week 7 Session: Designing the road
Matching three real road profiles from this unit's dataset to an engineering measure, then defending that choice against a complication.
5 April 2027
Before the session#
Read the three site cards below and the measure-comparison and cost tables from this week’s lecture. If you kept a note of the technology gap you identified in Week 6, bring it — it’s useful context, not required material.
The three sites#
Site A — Bunjalung Ridge Road. 15 km, Central Tablelands, 400 vehicles a day. Medium reporting coverage from an irregular ranger patrol and an active local wildlife-carer network. Authority: a small local council with a tightly constrained annual roads budget. Roadside scrub runs continuously both sides for most of the road’s length — there’s no single obvious pinch point.
Site B — Coorabin Road. 38 km, Northern Ranges, 2,800 vehicles a day. High reporting coverage: daily ranger patrols and fixed traffic cameras near two intersections. Authority: a regional road authority with a moderate discretionary budget, competing against many other roads in its network. Two known clustering points sit near creek crossings; the rest of the road runs lower frequency.
Site C — Merricourt Highway. 51 km, Coastal Corridor, 4,500 vehicles a day. High reporting coverage: routine highway-patrol coverage and a permanent traffic counter. Authority: a state transport department with a larger capital budget but a slower, more politically visible approval pipeline. Strikes are distributed along a long open corridor with no single obvious pinch point.
In the session#
| Step | Time | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 min | Groups of three or four read all three site cards together. |
| 2 | 10 min | Each group proposes one measure per site, with a one-line justification citing the evidence or cost table. |
| 3 | 10 min | Swap site assignments with another group, who raises one counter-scenario for each of your proposed measures (for example: the council’s fencing budget is cut by half; the underpass floods every wet season; the highway authority’s approval process will take three years longer than the funding cycle allows). |
| 4 | 10 min | Revise your proposal for each site in light of the counter-scenario you were given. |
| 5 | 10 min | Whole-room share-out: each group reports the one revision that most changed their original answer, and why. |
| 6 | 5 min | Write the one-page “Fence Is Not the Finish Line” design note (see below). |
Design note format (formative, not a final-project attachment)#
One page, one site of your choice. State: the measure you recommend, the
justification tied to the evidence or cost table, at least one limitation or
risk your revision surfaced (an end-of-fence problem, a budget ceiling, an
approval-timeline mismatch), and what evidence would change your
recommendation. This is a formative output for this week’s activity — it is
not required anywhere in assignment-1 or the final-project.
Afterwards#
Keep a note of any site where no engineering measure looked adequate on its own — those carry directly into Week 8’s law-and-liability material, where the question shifts from “what should be built” to “who has to pay for it, or answer for its absence.”
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you can match a candidate hotspot to an appropriate intervention type and state why, using the evidence and cost tables from the lecture
- you can name a case where engineering alone can't close the gap, and what changed your recommendation when it was raised
Teaching team
- Idris Fenn — tutor
- Marisol Quaye — convenor