Sponsored by D-TAL Engineering
Making roads worthy gets tougher amid changing needs, extreme weather
Dan Talevski’s primary focus in his civil design business, D-TAL Engineering, is to provide solutions that align with the environments our roads inhabit and the needs of the people who use them. And, of course, that they are as safe and as forgiving as possible.
Designing roads for efficient movement and safety is becoming increasingly challenging as vehicles evolve and extreme weather events test engineering knowhow. D-TAL Engineering
In just four years, D-TAL’s proficiency in road design, traffic management and road safety engineering has led to the business doubling in size annually, with inclusion in the AFR Fast Starters list representing another significant stride in a mission to become an industry-leading, one-stop shop for road design and civil engineering.
“Everybody is a road user, and they are our purpose – to design roads and transport links that are safe and add value to our communities,” Talevski says.
“It’s not always about how much a design solution costs—it’s about identifying the impact on the community, the impact on the environment, and how we, as a project team, can produce the best possible overall result.”
Getting to grips with a changing landscape
As vehicles continue to evolve rapidly, and our roads are increasingly impacted by extreme weather, users are looking all the more to road designers to provide solutions that help ferry us safely from A to B. The landscape is becoming more and more complex.
“It’s getting harder,” says Michael Nieuwesteeg, road safety and design program manager with AustRoads, the association of the Australian and New Zealand transport agencies representing all levels of government.
“We’re not creating more space, but we’re creating more demand for movement,” he says. “As our suburbs and cities grow bigger, busier, we’re saying that road designers need to shift to a design that reflects the place that a road is passing through.
D-TAL Engineering director Dan Talevski: the company has doubled in size annually with a focus on road design, traffic management and road safety engineering. D-TAL Engineering
“Historically, road designers focused on movement, which is really about the vehicle. Look across the road network and there’s a big variation in vehicle movement that’s needed. We’re now recognising much more that local streets and shopping strips are one example where the place value of the road is more important than the movement value.”
Nieuwesteeg manages the Road Design Taskforce, a program of road safety and design that includes representatives from Australian and New Zealand government transport agencies. They effectively own the AustRoads’ Guide To Road Design, which is downloaded more than 100,000 times a year.
Changing vehicle design adds a layer of complexity
Understanding who will use the road – cars, trucks, SUVs, cyclists, scooters, pedestrians – underpins its design. If the vehicle fleet’s evolution all arrived at the same place, road design would be comparatively easy. The increasingly broad range of vehicles, and their growth in size, adds another layer of complexity.
“Thinking bigger vehicles, you’ve changed the height of the driver, which impacts how far the driver can see,” Nieuwesteeg says. “You’re creating a different blind spot, impacting vehicles that are behind you, impacting pedestrians stepping out from behind a parked car that’s now higher than cars historically have been.
“There are further impacts for mass. At the moment, batteries are very heavy, so EVs [electric vehicles] are heavier. That has a really big impact on [road] pavements. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of paved roads in Australia, what’s our approach? What will the mass of a battery-powered vehicle be in 20 years? Are we dealing with a one-decade problem?”
Road designers have traditionally considered elements such as gradient, curvature, width of road and lanes and surrounding terrain (for example, is it situated next to a cliff?). Now, how the road might be impacted by bushfire or flood is an increasingly pertinent consideration.
“You’ve got to manage the event of the emergency – what happens during a bushfire or flood, how do we keep the network moving in that period?” Nieuwesteeg poses. “In addition to that question is, how are you building your road so it can be built back?
“The main struggle is going to be building roads with greater flood tolerance. We can’t afford to protect everything – maybe there will be some roads we have to let wash away. These are really hard questions.”
D-TAL powers on
Talevski’s career began at 17 through a cadetship with the old Road and Traffic Authority (now Transport for NSW) in the road designer training program. Experience as a contractor on big road projects led him ultimately to strike out on his own in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Soon, he was working on major NSW projects including the M7-M12 Integration Project and Sydney Fish Markets, where D-TAL delivered the temporary traffic management civil design scope.
Now just 33, he’s proud of D-TAL’s handsome growth path, and conscious that success and sustainability in this space is all about building roads that help deliver on the ultimate goal of “net zero” – zero fatalities.
“We are always looking at ways to improve road safety for all road users,” he says. “As design engineers we have an opportunity to make a positive impact, we are committed to always acting in the best interest of the road user.”
To learn more, visit dtalengineering.com/
Sponsored by D-TAL Engineering
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