Major road upgrades

Planit was engaged as the project manager on behalf of Council for the $12 million upgrade and widening of Ewingsdale Road, which includes three new concrete roundabouts at Bayshore Drive, Sunrise Boulevard and McGettigans Lane. Ewingsdale Road is the sole northern entry road to Byron Bay and experiences over 20,000 vehicle movements each way per day. Bayshore Drive is the main connection road to the Sunrise residential estate, the Arts and Industry Estate, the expanding Elements Resort and the newly completed Habitat mixed-use development.

Planit developed the tender documentation, performed the tender assessment and managed the design consultant. A major part of the role was the management of the roundabout design and planning for construction, including the development of project budgets and cost estimates.

With our local knowledge and experience in delivering Council projects, Planit was responsible for guiding the designers in order to reduce the impact on existing services and private property, whilst ensuring a long-term high level of service was provided at a minimal life-cycle cost.

An ecological assessment was conducted by Planit’s ecologists which involved vegetation assessment (including threatened flora searches and identifying endangered ecological communities) and fauna assessment utilising techniques such as spotlighting, amplified call playback, Anabat microbat survey and Koala SAT survey.

Following the on-site ecological assessment, avoidance, mitigation and management measures were implemented. This involved avoiding impacts to areas considered to represent high ecological values including koala habitat, compensating for the unavoidable vegetation loss through revegetation and weed management, and implementing management measures for the construction phase of the project (i.e. dust control, sediment and erosion control, vegetation management).