ConnectBetter
From 10-12 October 2017, four of our Abley/Interpret team members attended the Australasian Road Safety Conference in Perth. Over 650 delegates from across Australia, New Zealand and further afield attended this three day event to learn about the latest advances and research across a breadth of road safety topics.
Haris Zia, Senior Transportation Engineer at Abley, was invited by the Department of State Growth, Tasmania to attend the Road Safety Levy Workshop in Hobart on 28th September 2017. The purpose of the workshop was to explore options for the expenditure of Tasmania’s Road Safety Levy over the next decade.
Our strategic road safety work was internationally recognised at the Association of Transportation Safety Information Professionals (ATSIP) Traffic Records Forum held in New Orleans 6-9 August 2017. Abley Transport Consultants was awarded First Place in the "Best Visualization Competition" for forecasting crash locations using existing transport data.
Click here to read our latest newsletter.
Carl O’Neil and Paul Durdin recently won the AA award for ‘Best Paper’ and the award for ‘Best Practice Paper’ at the IPENZ Transportation Group Conference in Hamilton.
The existing process for the safe and appropriate speed management of New Zealand roads is non-specific and crash-rate focused. Not all roads are created equal therefore the approach to the speed management of roads should be multi-faceted and specific to each road. Working with New Zealand Transport Agency, Abley has proposed such a method that focuses on a range of attributes of a road to create an entire picture, known as the Speed Management Framework (SMF).
2015 saw a sharp increase in deaths on New South Wales’ road network following several years of road toll reductions. Of major concern were the increasing number of crashes on high speed rural curves. With 37,000 km of State and Regional rural roads, manually assessing the risk of each curve would be time-consuming and cost-prohibitive. Thankfully, Abley has previously developed an award winning geospatial tool, based on the Austroads Operating Speed Model, that identifies out-of-context curves on rural roads. Out-of-context curves are those at a higher risk of being the location of loss-of-control crashes.
Speeding, impaired driving (alcohol, drugs, distraction, fatigue) and failure to wear a seat belt are still the leading causes of death and serious injury on our roads. The Transport Accident Commission (TAC) in Victoria recognises the powerful role enforcement plays in preventing these behaviours and consequently is a strong supporter of police enforcement activity. One example is the TAC’s investment in the Local Enhanced Enforcement Program (LEEP). For over a decade, LEEP has encouraged Victoria Police members to submit funding applications to the TAC to conduct operations targeting road safety issues in their local areas. These funded operations and enforcement activities are in addition to, and supplement, traffic enforcement already undertaken by police.