Greetings,
A major problem I have encountered in LG land division engineering is the lack of standards &/or maintaining adherence to standards (and the good professional reasoning behind the standards). So often we come across standards that are applied as "the law" without any reasoning noted on the standards. I for one would like to see our engineering standard requirements presented with discussion on the design objectives and required outcomes. That will go a long way to stopping the standards being changed, downgraded or ignored in the future without due regard to the required outcomes.
A pet aggravation is when land division & development designers use all minimum standard dimensions. The whole idea is that when a bare minimum dimension is used, other dimensions must be greater than the minimum to compensate. Let's get away from these garages that are not wide enough to open the door and get you shopping (or child booster seat) out of the doors. When we have minimum dimension garages in these squeezey new houses, no one parks their car in them. They become a junk room or worse - an inhabited room (like an extra [cold] bedroom). This means that cars are parked on driveways and out on the streets. You see there are always impacts from using minimum dimensions.
Let's get back to requiring good thoughtful design, NOT minimums everywhere.
-------------------------------------------
Peter HARPER
Town of Gawler
GAWLER SAau
-------------------------------------------