Oral Presentation Public Works Conference 2022

While annual road deaths in Australia are decreasing, there are still on average 1,100 deaths every year.  Further reducing this requires new innovations and better targeted interventions. Right now, there is a plethora of transport data available to road managers, but the big question is, how can it be used to make a difference in the real world?

This question has been the guiding principle in developing of a series of metrics, focused on road safety, that provide visibility of key issues at a national level and enable transport managers to take action that saves lives.

This presentation will cover the process used to develop key road safety metrics by moving the data up the value pyramid, as well as the rationale for taking a national approach.

The key steps in the process include:

• data sourcing
• harmonisation and accessibility
• deriving value, and
• presenting clear insights.

Any one of which can be a roadblock to action.

The first step in the process is sourcing relevant data, in the case, road safety data.  Our transport challenges are multi-faceted so no single data source can solve them. Instead, data is needed from multiple sources which might include open data, commercial data suppliers and in-house data collection services.

The next step in the process is harmonisation which takes fragmented and siloed source data into a format where they can work together. This step typically encompasses the largest volume of work and requires both subject matter expertise as well as data management and processing skills.  The final output of this stage must also provide a level of accessibility in order to progress up the value pyramid.

Deriving value requires consultation with practitioners to determine how best to identify issues on the road network.  The problems can then be quantified by combining data sources into key metrics or indexes to allow for consistent comparison across the road network.

Finally, clear communication and visualisation of the data, along with the right audience is critical to ensure the data has an impact.  Maps, graphs, ranking table all have a role to play in highlight problems, and the solutions that road manages can action.

Quantifying and ranking issues on the road network at a national level provides two key benefits:

1. it assists regions that may not have the resource to do their own data collection and processing, and
2. it targets national funding to the most high-risk situations through nationally consistent benchmarking.