Top 5 take-away messages for engineers and auditors from the Australasian Road Safety Conference

For those that couldn’t make this year’s conference in Adelaide, I thought I’d share my top 5 take away messages from the conference (associated with road safety infrastructure).

1. Safe System Assessments are proven to reduce fatal and serious injuries by 60% - 100%

A groundbreaking research report by Blair Turner, Farhana Ahmed and Brayden McHeim (ARRB) has shown that the first 85 Safe System Assessments undertaken in Victoria resulted in changes to the designs of major projects that will improve road safety outcomes by between 60 and 100 percent.

The analysis showed that the original preliminary designs (75 of which had already been subject to Road Safety Audits) were significantly improved by following the Safe System Assessment process set out by Austroads in the Safe System Assessment Framework, and by VicRoads in the Safe System Assessment Guidelines.

Lachlan Moir (Dept Transport and Main Roads, Queensland) presented Queensland’s new Road Safety Policy which includes mandatory use of the Safe System Assessment Framework and David Williamson (Dept of Transport, Victoria (VicRoads)) presented the Victorian policy that mandates Safe System Assessments on major infrastructure projects. And another paper by Brayden McHeim, Ben Matters, Lisa Steinmetz and Blair Turner was presented that detailed some of the intricacies of undertaking a Safe System Assessment on a major road upgrade program.

This shows that Safe System Assessments are not a nice-to-do anymore, they are a must-do for any sizable infrastructure project that interacts with the road environment.

2. Raised safety platforms are saving lives and preventing serious injuries

Papers by Amit Dua (DPTI SA), Dr Chris Stokes and Professor Jeremy Woolley (CASR) all showed the significant safety benefits of raised safety platforms at intersections. This included signalised and non-signalised intersections on medium to high volume roads.

The fact that the largest source of road trauma at intersections in all capital cities of Australia are large signalised intersections was discussed in detail, and the practice of continuing to build more high-speed signalised intersections expecting different results was labeled insanity.

3. Side Road Activated Speeds are here to stay

Papers presented by Radie Maliki (Dept of Transport, Victoria (VicRoads)), Aaron Wu (Trafficworks), Daniel Mustata (Road Solutions), Adam Wilmot (GHD) and Chris Jurewicz (TAC) all referred to the advantages of Side Road Activated Speed Limits.

Originating in New Zealand, and comprehensively evaluated by Hamish Mackie (Mackie Research), Victoria has now installed these active speed limit signs at a variety of high-risk locations around regional Victoria. South Australia has also recently installed a number of trial sites. Positive results are being seen across the board.

4. Roundabouts don’t need to cost so much

In back-to-back plenary presentations Chris Davis (Mildura Rural City Council) and Doug Bradbrook (Mornington Peninsula Shire Council) both showed examples of low-cost roundabouts installed on their road networks that were providing as good results as the much more expensive traditional options.

Both use smaller radius roundabouts and straight approaches which significantly reduce the cost of service relocation and land acquisition. The speed reductions are achieved with vertical deflection (raised platforms) and larger vehicles are catered for with mountable islands.

This concept was also presented in the Safe System for Universities (SS4U) Symposium by Wayne Moon (Dept of Transport, Victoria (VicRoads)) using the Lance Creek compact rural roundabout as the example.

5. Road Safety Audits (and Auditors) must change to keep pace

One of the papers I presented was written by Paul Hilliar, Aut Kandacharkuc and myself and it detailed the new Austroads requirements for Road Safety Audits. This includes the analysis of kinetic energy in audit findings, the categorisation of recommendations into Safe System categories and the enhanced independence requirements for Road Safety Auditors.

It has been identified that many auditors have not changed their practices to conform with these new requirements. This may go part of the way to explaining why Safe System Assessments are outperforming Road Safety Audits (see take away message 1 above). Shifting industry practices in Road Safety Auditing will require both a bottom-up and top-down approach instigated by road authorities.

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Some of the photos from the conference are available on the Safe System Solutions Pty Ltd website:

www.SafeSystemSolutions.com.au

If you would like copies of any of the papers presented, please contact me at [email protected]