Roads

Disclaimer

Geoscape Australia believes this publication to be correct at the time of printing and does not accept responsibility for any consequences arising from the use of the information herein. Readers should rely on their own skill and judgement to apply information to particular issues.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission of Geoscape Australia.

Overview

Roads is a digital representation of the road network of Australia. Roads contains linear features to describe surfaces that have been improved to enable vehicular, pedestrian and bicycle transportation on land and ferry routes that enable vehicles to cross water bodies.

Release Summary

This product was released to customers on 20 December 2023 with data extracted on 11 December 2023.

• This release is a full national data population for Version 1.5 of the Roads product, described by the Roads Product Description v1.5.

• Roads provides a foundational linear road network for Australia, with characteristics of the road attributed to the Roads feature.

Any issues that have been identified for this release are described in the Issues section.

Change Notifications

ESRI Shapefile width increase

Commencing with the February 2024 release, the width of numeric fields within Esri Shapefiles will increase by one. This is due to a bug fix in our packaging application. This change only impacts Shapefile metadata, the values and precision remain unchanged.

Removal of the ‘Documents’ folder from data packages

From November 2023, Geoscape will be progressively moving product descriptions, guides and reports online to https://docs.geoscape.com.au

Commencing with the May 2024 release, data packages will no longer include the Documents folder.

Issues

New Issues

Tasmania data supply issues

Due to supply issues with data from Tasmania, this release will not include updates to roads within this state.

Resolved Issues

No resolved issues.

Ongoing Issues

Ongoing Topology Improvements

There are a small number of isolated roads, spikes, self-intersections, undershoots, and overshoots remaining within the Roads geometry. These are being investigated and will be managed through enhancements to the topology rules.

Speed assignment

In Victoria, short road segments at complex intersections may have incorrectly received a speed value from an adjacent road. This is visible where the speed value changes between each road segment. There are also cases where the speed value on highways have been assigned a null value. These are being investigated and will be managed through enhancements to the speed assignment rules.

Date_modified updated due to geometry rounding

A number of Roads are receiving an updated date_modified due to geometry shifts of less than 1 millimetre. This will be resolved in a future release. This issue is most prominent in QLD.

Improvements to date_created

The date_created currently does not reflect the date the road feature first entered the product in all instances. In a future release, this will be rectified by updating the date_created on impacted features to the date they were added to the product.

Access Roads with a subtype of Pathway

In Western Australia, 571 records have been assigned a hierarchy of ACCESS ROAD and a subtype of PATHWAY. These records should have been assigned a hierarchy of FOOTPATH.

TAS road features under bridges attributed as tunnel

There are approximately 550 road features in Tasmania assigned a subtype of ‘Tunnel’ when the road feature is not a tunnel but is crossed by a bridge. As this does not meet the definition provided in the product description it will be resolved in a future release.

QLD Vehicle track assigned a subtype of Pathway

Pathways in QLD have been assigned a hierarchy of VEHICLE TRACK, this impacts a total of 3,759 records. The assignment of the correct hierarchy will be addressed in a future release.

QLD Paper Roads

In Queensland, a number of new roads are classified as proposed instead of constructed by the jurisdiction and as a result, these are not included in the Geoscape Roads product. Geoscape is assessing these roads and will look to implement a fix in an upcoming release.

Future Considerations

This section outlines enhancements or changes under consideration, but not planned into a specific release. For further details on future initiatives, please contact Geoscape Support.

Road Elevation

The assignment of elevation values to Roads features is anticipated to be the assignment of a Z value to every vertex on a Roads geometry.

Other Territories

The use of the State Abbreviation of ‘OT’ is being considered for the following areas (current State assignment in brackets):

• Cocos (Keeling) Islands (WA)

• Christmas Island (WA)

• Norfolk Island (yet to be included in the Roads product)

• Jervis Bay Territory (NSW)

Roundabout hierarchy

The hierarchy assigned to a roundabout is being reviewed for enhancement. Currently, Roads features with a subtype of ROUNDABOUT have a hierarchy assigned based upon the jurisdictional classification. This assignment can cause scenarios where Roads segments on a single roundabout can have different hierarchies. It is being considered whether a roundabout should have all segments assigned with the hierarchy of the most significant connecting road.

Roundabout one_way

Roads segments with a subtype of ROUNDABOUT have a one_way attribute classified based upon the supply received from the jurisdiction. It is being considered whether Roads with a subtype of ROUNDABOUT should be classified as ONE WAY.

Aggregation of Roads

Where exactly two Roads geometries connect, and the Roads share common attribution it is being considered whether these Roads features should be aggregated into a single Roads feature. At intersections with three or more intersecting road segments no aggregation will be considered.

Annex A – Release Counts

For the roads table the additional, retired, updated and total roads counts, as well as the percent change to the previous release have been listed in the table below.

TABLE NAME		ACT	NSW	NT	OT	QLD	SA	TAS	VIC	WA	TOTAL
roads	Additional	27	445	9	0	371	211	0	2,798	101	3,962
	Retired	10	317	9	0	273	288	0	1,270	116	2,283
	Updated	9	4,488	0	0	875	292	111	5,006	1,499	12,280
	Total	66,583	1,327,611	48,715	0	544,322	392,970	275,899	973,586	602,527	4,232,213
	% Change	0.03%	0.01%	0.00%	0.00%	0.02%	-0.02%	0.00%	0.16%	0.00%	0.04%
street_locality_line	Total	81,209	1,480,257	52,868	0	626,172	472,831	296,863	1,136,001	685,615	4,831,816