Austroads: Transport Research and Trends

This webinar is beneficial to consultants who may be interested in tendering for Austroads projects. The session covers new Austroads projects lined up for the 2023-24 financial year, Austroads process around research data collection and what is required to become a successful tenderer.

To find information about Austroads' current tenders, visit the tenders webpage. On that page, you can also subscribe to our Tenders newsletter to receive alerts when a new project is advertised.

Decisions on how transport agencies provide for people walking to safely cross the roads has been greatly influenced by historical research, that has in the past failed to examine the infrastructure design and lacked behavioural data.

This webinar, presented by Mark McDonald, Principal Technologist (Bicycles, Pedestrians and Motorcycles) at the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads, looks at the different types of pedestrian crossing controls, behavioural responses of both drivers and people crossing and analyse the road safety implications. The presentation goes through the crash characteristics involved, including control of crash forces, analysis of crash braking patterns, the impact of uniform pavement marking on reaction times, speed and yield rates and crash reduction factors.

The webinar gives a review of safe system and evidence-based research relating to unsignalised crossings for people walking or riding bikes. It answers the questions: Who are we relying on? What is the safety evidence? Is “false sense of security” supported by evidence?

Road safety barriers are a critical component of a safe road transport system and are saving lives and preventing serious injuries every day across Australian and New Zealand roads. To ensure they deliver their intended safety outcomes and manage the extreme forces involved in high-speed crashes, barriers must be correctly installed and maintained.

This webinar with Michael Nieuwesteeg and Chris Koniditsiotis from Austroads, Robert Tabor and Stephanie Craig from Lantra, Jade Hogan from Transport for NSW and Evan Coulson from the Department of Transport Victoria presents the Austroads Safety Hardware Training and Accreditation Scheme (ASHTAS), which delivers a high standard and nationally consistent set of training outcomes for individuals installing and maintaining road safety barriers in Australia and New Zealand.

ASHTAS responds to Austroads members, along with the road safety barrier industry, who have been concerned about the quality of installation of road safety barriers which may put the safety of the public and road workers at risk.

Austroads has updated the Guide to Road Design Part 6: Roadside Design, Safety and Barriers (AGRD Part 6) introducing new sections on the fundamentals of safety barrier systems and design advice for other road safety devices.

This webinar, presented by Dr Rod Troutbeck and Richard Fanning, focuses on the updated Section 6 providing an overview of the process to design the installation of a safety barrier.

The session describes the actions for defining the context of the installation including choosing an appropriate containment level. It also outlines the preliminary design tasks of selecting a barrier and defining its lateral and longitudinal position.

The aspects of detailed design are also described, including the installation refinements, selecting the appropriate terminal or transition and the structural design of a proposed barrier. Finally, the webinar briefly describes the documentation of the design.

Austroads has updated the Guide to Road Design Part 6: Roadside Design, Safety and Barriers (AGRD Part 6) introducing new sections on the fundamentals of safety barrier systems and design advice for other road safety devices.

This webinar, presented by Dr Rod Troutbeck and Richard Fanning, covers the new structure of AGRD Part 6 and new information included as part of the current guide update focusing on the following sections:

• Section 4: Treatment Options, including options for consideration for a number of relatively common hazards
• Section 5: Fundamentals of Safety Barrier Systems, including information to assist users to make informed decisions when selecting a barrier system for a particular site
• Section 6: Road Safety Barriers, including design process.

The webinar also provides details and the research background to a number of new concepts and processes that have been included in AGRD Part 6. These include barrier flexibility as a measure of their performance, the use of working width rather than deflection, the need to choose an appropriate containment level, the use of a new concept of the departure points of redirection, the placement of barriers behind kerbs, a revised method to calculate the length of need, the need to install barriers in appropriate soils and the orientation of barriers on superelevated roadways.

This webinar introduces Austroads new projects lined up for the 2022-23 financial year.

The session is most beneficial to consultants who may be interested in tendering for Austroads projects.

Upcoming projects focus on road network resilience, pavement design, movement and place, cycling and micromobility, future freight vehicles, road design, driver licensing, climate change risk assessment, automated and electric vehicle data exchange and provision.

Guide to Road Design is Austroads’ most downloaded publication with more than 155,000 copies accessed in the last 18 months.

A recent project looked at whether improvements could be made based on recently released Austroads research. That review identified possible inclusions relating to improvements to practice focusing on Safe System, the vulnerability of motorcycles and specific heavy vehicle road design considerations.

A report “Inclusion of Recent Road Safety Research in the Guide to Road Design Phase 2” proposed updates to the Guide to Road Design, as well as suggested improvements for the Guide to Road Safety and Guide to Traffic Management. The report also detailed a process to be followed to include future research into the guides and bring any new updates into practice in an efficient and timely manner.

This webinar with Noel O’Callaghan and Malcolm Mak presents a detailed overview of the report.

This webinar presents the new Austroads Guide to Road Safety Part 6: Road Safety Audit.

Key topics covered in the webinar include:

• Strengthening the requirements within the Guide as the default for Australia and New Zealand and formal exemption protocol for jurisdictions.
• Identifying the roles, responsibilities and conduct required of all stakeholders to achieve optimum value from the process, especially including parties operating outside of the road agency, e.g. private sector clients. The importance of commissioning and responding to audits.
• The provision of further guidance and clarity on competency and qualification requirements to inform local protocols for the assessment across the tiers of auditor.
• Integration of road safety auditing within the Safe System and the emerging practical interface with recent tools such as Safe System Assessments.
• Improving the quality and consistency of how risks / hazards are expressed, assessed, and prioritised.
• New documents, templates and tools throughout the Guide, including audit checklists (now referred to as ‘prompt lists’), audit code of conduct, road safety audit policies, sample road safety audit reports etc.

The webinar presenters are Paul Hillier (Project Consultant), Joseph Le (Co-Project Manager) and Kenn Beer (Co-Project Manager and Technical Advisor).

The Australian Road Assessment Program (AusRAP) was introduced to Australia by state mobility clubs, with the Australian Automobile Association (AAA) providing leadership in partnership with Austroads, Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) and the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP). The AusRAP partnership has worked together in conjunction with state, territory and local governments on infrastructure safety investment optimisation and measurement since 2001. A Memorandum of Understanding between AAA, Austroads, iRAP and ARRB was signed in 2012. Recognising the extensive use of the AusRAP protocols and systems at an institutional level by road agencies across Australia, leadership of AusRAP is now transitioning from the AAA to Austroads.

The Austroads-led AusRAP Program will build on an extensive platform of local experience and application by state and local government agencies, motoring clubs, Austroads and ARRB. In total over 300,000 km of AusRAP star rating and investment planning assessments have been completed, over 50,000 km of risk mapping and over 400 km of road designs have been star rated in Australia. The partnership will continue to benefit from, and contribute to, the global iRAP partnerships that are in place in over 100 countries worldwide.

This webinar covers the following:

• New leadership, governance and collaboration for AusRAP
• Global directions and learnings from the UK
• Exciting developments in Australia
• Next steps for AusRAP.

The webinar is presented by Geoff Allan, Michael Nieuwesteeg, Rob McInerney, James Bradford and John Hardwick.

The Review of the Guide to Road Safety and Structure for Online Access project has updated the Guide to Road Safety with the latest research, primarily from Austroads published material, and restructured the guide for better online access and to allow content to be more easily added in the future.

This is a second webinar in a two-part series to provide an overview on the updated guide. Presented by Kenn Beer, Dr Tana Tan and Johan Strandroth, this session focuses on Part 7, which contains guidance on contemporary approaches to road safety strategy development and road safety management.

The webinar covers the latest concepts and practices in strategy development including target setting, backcasting for scenario building and the use of performance indicators to sustain a results-focused approach to whole-of-road system transformation.