{"id":2430,"date":"2020-07-28T10:14:06","date_gmt":"2020-07-28T00:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/?p=2430"},"modified":"2020-07-28T10:14:06","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T00:14:06","slug":"property-access","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/2020\/07\/property-access\/","title":{"rendered":"Property Access"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps not surprisingly, things on the Council front have been pretty quiet of late, but one of the most common \u2018problems\u2019 that I encounter arose yet again just the other day. I think I\u2019ve mentioned previously that a former local councillor and Mayor once said to me that when he writes his account of his civic life, it will be entitled \u201cBarking Dogs and Rights of Way\u201d. I reckon I\u2019ll write a follow-on work entitled \u201cRights of Way Too\u201d. The most recent issue wasn\u2019t specifically a Right of Way<\/a> matter\u2014it related primarily to the location of a driveway\u2014but it ended up that way.<\/p>\n

As it is generally managed by a property developer at the time of subdivision, many residents are not aware of the fact that council approval is required to provide property access to the existing road network, if not always explicitly for the construction of a driveway. While the construction of a driveway itself must generally comply with council\u2019s Development Control Plan<\/a> (DCP), access to the road network must also satisfy the requirements of the relevant National Road (AustRoads<\/a>) Standards. For this reason, access points onto higher usage roads, classified and arterial<\/a> roads, are generally restricted and new subdivisions, rural residential subdivisions in particular, are generally required to provide an internal road network with a single access point onto any major road. Multiple access points from a single property are also not encouraged, although additional entry points for stock movement or emergency access, certainly on larger properties, are not uncommon.<\/p>\n

In the case at point, a resident had sought and been granted approval for a second access point to their property. The resident had assumed that, having been granted this approval, there would be no further restrictions on the use of this access point. Indeed, while it was approved explicitly as a \u201csecond access\u201d, council had not imposed any specific conditions on its usage. However, when the resident subsequently sought to subdivide their property, and use the \u201csecond access\u201d to the original property as the primary access to the newly subdivided lot, they were advised that this would not be acceptable.<\/p>\n

At one level, this is simply a change of use matter and the interested reader is referred to earlier posts<\/a> on this subject. In the first instance, the \u2018development\u2019, the access point, was approved as a \u201csecond access\u201d to an existing property and, under the prevailing circumstances, was considered acceptable. Changing the use of the \u2018development\u2019 to be the primary access to a newly created lot, however, brought into play additional considerations, relating particularly to the potential increase in traffic movements onto a classified road, that rendered the proposed new use unacceptable. To complicate matters even further, since the proposed subdivision would separate this \u201csecond access\u201d from the original property, it could no longer even be considered a \u201csecond access\u201d for that property, requiring it to be closed off entirely in the course of creating the proposed subdivision.<\/p>\n

The upshot of all this was that the subdivision approval required the new lot to be accessed from the local road provided to service the original rural residential subdivision, not the classified road that also ran past the property. This subsequently required the subdivision proposal to be modified to include either direct access to the local road for the new lot or an appropriate Right of Way through the original property, the latter never a particularly \u2018elegant\u2019 solution for all the reasons articulated in the soon to be published accounts \u201cBarking Dogs and Rights of Way\u201d and \u201cRights of Way Too\u201d. <\/p>\n

Perhaps the point to be made here is that it is important to consider a development proposal in its entirety, not just as a collection of individual elements. If the \u201csecond access\u201d had been identified as the proposed driveway for a newly subdivided lot at the outset, it would likely have been assessed quite differently and a potentially expensive misunderstanding might have been avoided.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps not surprisingly, things on the Council front have been pretty quiet of late, but one of the most common \u2018problems\u2019 that I encounter arose yet again just the other day. I think I\u2019ve mentioned previously that a former local councillor and Mayor once said to me that when he writes his account of his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2430"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2440,"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430\/revisions\/2440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peteharrison.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}