Victorian 4wd track closures

I just got back from a weekend of camping near Walhalla which is a really beautify area if you ever get the chance to visit.  Anyway, I had heard a number of the people coming were planning to go four-wheel driving and I thought it might be a chance to find out what my new (to me) Freelander could do, so I set about making some maps of the area.

The maps just re-use a set of styles I had previously developed to create some topographic maps of rural areas that had worked pretty well for me in the past, with almost all the data downloaded from data.vic.gov.au.  Everything was going well until realised I should check if there were any track closures in the area and after a quick google search I found Parks Victoria - Seasonal road closures, and it turns out there were quite a few, both seasonal and management vehicle only tracks.  In the past I had tried to use tracks from the Vicmap Transport - Road Network dataset that on arriving at the track, discovered they had clearly closed many years before, so I was interested to see how I could include this on the map (spoiler, I went for option 3).

Option 1 - Find a Seasonal closure map layer

I tried, but couldn't fine one.

Option 2 - Digitize the Seasonal closure map

Pro: Most accurate information for seasonal road closures and management vehicles
Con: Time consuming to geocode the pdf map and then hand drawing all the road closures or manually adding a field to the data

Option 3 - Dig deeper into existing data

Pro: Easy to implement and had some additional information
Con: Less detailed information and might be less up to date

It turns out the the Road Network dataset I was already using had a 'Restrictions' field in it which (once you finally locate the attribute list) includes:
1 = Management Vehicles Only
2 = Subject To Seasonal closure
3 = Subject To Height Or Weight Limits
4 = Road Permanently Closed
5 = Private Access
6 = Road Unmaintained
7 = Dry Weather Only  

In the end I duplicated my road layer and created a transparent overlay that included different colours for management vehicles, seasonal road closure and road closed which worked really well.  The down side is that the actual seasonal road closure map showed less tracks which were subject to closure and it had two different dates for when they open.  To remedy this I took the low tech path, I just printed out the pdf and treated the layer on my digital map as flag to double check the official information...

All in all it was a great (though slightly soggy) weekend away.  The Freelander survived and I discovered it was at least as capable as rumored, just as well since half the rigs I was rolling with were modified, and I also discovered the geocoded maps worked really well on a tablet.


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