Austroads: Transport Research and Trends

Austroads has recently published the final report for the three-year project Data to Support the Heavy Vehicle Road Reform, which has investigated a number of different aspects of the requirements, gaps, and opportunities for supplying infrastructure data suitable for supporting a future heavy vehicle cost recovery and investment process. It represents a total of seven years of work from 2013 to 2020.

The project explored issues related to the supply of data on freight routes required by the Heavy Vehicle Road Reform. This included: how to measure the level of service (LOS) of freight routes, mechanisms for obtaining nationally harmonised data about road assets, and providing insight into the nature, quality and consistency of road-related data across Australian jurisdictions.

This webinar, presented by Ulysses Ai, provides a summary of the project’s main activities and key learnings including:

• Development of the Heavy Vehicle Infrastructure Rating as a concise measure of LOS for freight routes.
• Development of the National Asset Register and learnings from processes seeking to obtain asset data from local governments.
• A study of candidates for a national base map for road-related data and guidance on subsequent processes for data-matching.
• An analysis of inconsistencies in traffic data.
• Investigation of practices across Australian jurisdictions for expenditure reporting data, pavement deterioration modelling, and maintenance data records.