Abstract Manager

Under Investment Plan 26: Regional Safe Travel in Local Streets (STiLS), Department of Transport Planning (DTP) installed traffic calming devices in numerous regional communities around Victoria, Australia. In 2023 GHD were engaged by DTP to evaluate the STiLS installations in Corio/Norlane and South Geelong to confirm if the program had indeed delivered “safe travel”.

Rather than rely on conventional Automatic Tube Counters (ATC) and video survey instruments at more than 350 sites, GHD proposed to collaborate and innovate with DTP to utilise the emerging vehicle telemetric data from Compass IoT. This data provides vehicle performance information at points on the road network from vehicles constructed after 2019.

Together with DTP, GHD have analysed this data along neighbourhood roads to compare driver behaviour before and after treatment. Numerous pre-processing, analysis and interpretation tasks have been undertaken to prepare compelling visual displays that demonstrate the success of the STiLS treatments.

Outputs have been prepared using raw speed and acceleration data for a sample street, as well as tailored displays of before and after vehicle behaviour. The same data has then been used to visualize the localised effects of treatments on vehicle behaviour, before examining more broadly safety in areas at a neighbourhood level.

Criteria for measuring safety has included looking at speeds (average and 85^th percentile), acceleration and deceleration zones attributed to a treatment, determining fatality risk percentage for pedestrians, and looking at the amount of kinetic energy in a system.

Using these tools, GHD and DTP can influence decision makers, planners and designers to improve road safety outcomes across Victoria.