Who approves your traffic management plan in Victoria, and how long it takes

14 Aug

The question I get asked more than any other is not what goes in a plan. It is who has to say yes to it.

Fair enough too. You can have a perfectly good plan sitting on your desk and still not be allowed to start work. The plan is not the permission. The plan is what you submit to get the permission.

Here is how it works in Victoria, from someone who started on the road as a traffic controller, on site managing real traffic and real risk twenty years ago.

First question: whose road is it?

Everything follows from this. Get it wrong and you will submit to the wrong authority and lose a week finding out. Victoria has two kinds of road authority for these purposes.

Local roads sit with the council.

Residential streets, most shopping strips, footpaths, laneways, car parks, nature strips. If it is the sort of road you would drive down to get to a house, it is almost certainly a council road.

Arterial and state managed roads sit with the Department of Transport and Planning.

Major arterial-type, high-impact roads. Anything carrying traffic between suburbs rather than within them, anything feeding a freeway, and anything with a road number attached to it.

There are some jobs where it is across both a local council road and a Department of Transport and Planning road. For example, a site on a corner where a local street meets a major arterial-type road which requires both authorities involved.

How to check, rather than guess

Do not eyeball it. Two ways to check properly.

Ask the council directly. Most councils will tell you over the phone whether a road is theirs or if it’s a Department of Transport and Planning (DTP) road.
Look it up on Melways Online register. On his register there is a Key to Map guide which will help you determining what road your project works are on. All you need to do is type the full address of your project location into the search bar and select the correct address that populates.

What you are actually submitting

You are not submitting a plan for approval on its own. You are applying for permission to work in or occupy the road reserve, and the plan is what supports that application.

The application usually needs:

The permit or consent for that authority.

For DTP roads: That's the Memorandum of Authorisation (MOA), sometimes alongside a separate Works Within Road Reserve (WWRR) approval. For council roads: It's a permit specific to that council, so it pays to check what they call it before you lodge. Your traffic management plan, and a traffic guidance scheme for each stage or arrangement.

Dates, hours of work and how long you need the space.
Details of who's doing the on-site traffic control.
Sometimes evidence of insurance and the qualifications of whoever prepared the plan.
Additional documentation such as site plans or measurements.

That last one catches people out. Some authorities will ask who designed the plan and what they are accredited to design. It is not a formality.

The accreditation part, and why it matters more than people expect

For roads managed by the Department of Transport and Planning, the business preparing the design has to hold DTP Temporary Traffic Management Design accreditation. Not the individual. The business.

That's the part people miss. You can have a designer with every qualification going, and if the business they work for isn't accredited, that plan can't be used for a DTP road and the permit won't issue. It's not a loophole in the system, it's the whole point of how the scheme is built.

It's why plenty of operators can do council work and can't do arterial work. It's not a reflection on the people involved. It's a business-level gate, not a personal one.

OnPoint holds that accreditation for Categories 1 and 2.

How long it takes

This is the part nobody will give you a straight answer on, so here is mine.

It varies by authority, and it varies a lot. Some councils turn a straightforward application around in a few days. Others take a few weeks, and more if the works are complex or the road is busy.

DTP applications generally take longer than council ones, usually it is minimum 15 business days after the MOA and WWRR application submission date. because there is more at stake on those roads.

What I will say with confidence is this. The single biggest variable is not the authority. It is whether your application is complete and correct the first time.

An application that goes in clean gets processed. An application with a gap in it goes into a queue, comes back with questions, and you start the clock again. I have seen the same council turn one job around in three days and another in three weeks, and the difference was entirely in what was submitted.

Why plans get knocked back

Twenty years of doing this and the reasons barely change.

The plan doesn't match the site. Generic drawings, or a plan that was clearly done for a similar job somewhere else. Assessors know what a template looks like.

The staging doesn't make sense. Works that run over several days or several arrangements need a scheme for each one. One drawing covering a week of changing conditions won't do it.

Pedestrians have been treated as an afterthought. This is the most common one by a distance. Where do people walk when your work zone takes the footpath? If the answer isn't clearly drawn, expect questions.

The wrong qualification prepared it. There's a real difference between the ticket that lets someone implement a plan on site and the qualification that lets someone design one. They're not interchangeable, and assessors check.

It contradicts itself. Signage that doesn't match the layout. A detour that doesn't connect. Times that don't line up with the permit. Small things, but they stop an application dead.

What to have ready before you apply

If you want the fastest possible path through, have this sorted before you go anywhere near a form.

The exact site address and which road authority owns that section
Your start and finish dates, and your daily working hours
What you are actually doing, in plain terms
Whether you need to close or occupy a lane, a footpath, or a parking bay
The largest vehicle that needs to get in and out
Whether there are bus routes, tram lines, bike lanes, schools or hospitals nearby

That last one changes things more than people expect. A job next to a school has requirements a job on an industrial street does not.

The short version

Work out whose road it is first. Submit the right application to the right authority with a plan that matches your site. Make sure whoever prepared it is qualified to prepare it, and that the business is accredited if it's a state managed road.

Do that and approval is largely administrative. Skip a step and you'll spend longer chasing the permit than doing the work.

If you would rather not work it out yourself

We prepare traffic management plans and traffic guidance schemes for construction, civil works, utilities and events across Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory. We'll tell you which authority you're dealing with and prepare a plan built for that authority's requirements.

Send us your site and we'll have a fixed price quote back to you in about 15 minutes. Approve it, and your plan is drawn within four hours, amendments included. Need the permit too? We can get that for you.

Moana Hope is Director and Senior Traffic Management Planner at OnPoint TGS Plans. She has over 20 years in traffic management and previously founded and ran a traffic control operation of more than 300 crew, serving as General Manager for 11 years.

Summary of what I need from Mo

Five things, flagged in amber through the draft:

Is the two authority split described correctly, and is there a simple test a contractor can use?
Is the public road register the right thing to point people at, and is there one worth naming?
What are the permit and consent documents actually called, for council and for DTP?
Are you comfortable giving indicative approval timeframes, and if so what ranges?
A real example would lift this a long way. A job where the application went in clean and moved fast, or one where a gap in the paperwork cost time. No client names needed, just the shape of it.