Bruce Highway Road Operations Improvement Project

Aline Laborde & Manu Hingorani

WSP Australia & DTMR, Queensland

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ABSTRACT

The Bruce Highway Road Operations Improvement Project involves the development of an enhanced road operations programme for 1,700km of the rural portion of the Bruce Highway. Implementation of ITS on this scale in a rural and remote environment has not been done before in Australia.

The highway is managed by multiple Districts and subject to a variety of impacts; including congestion, crashes, bushfires, landslides and flooding. TMR deploys various treatments and devices to assist in identifying and mitigating the effects of these impacts. The upgrade will enable the road operator to share real time situational awareness on the rural portions of the highway.

Innovations included:

• use of unique data aggregation/analytical techniques in combination with Wireless Traffic Sensors for incident detection.
• development of a flood monitoring system for rural environments that can be deployed efficiently and consistently across vast distances and support remote maintenance capabilities.
• innovations to enable efficient power use; including methods to reduce device power consumption in the rural environment.

Importantly, devices had to be designed around the available power and telecommunications systems, as wired power and telecommunications connectivity is not always available in regional environments. This meant that power efficiency methods had to be given priority.

The design focused on use of ‘off the shelf’, modular, low power devices and STREAMS Communication Processors. The latter were used for communications with STREAMS, primarily via Telstra Cellular NTUs in compliance with TMR specifications.

Success for this project involves:

• Enhanced safety by increasing situational awareness and minimising challenges in managing events.
• Improved Flood Immunity; resulting increased reliability of the road network and reduced duration of closures during a flood.
• Enhance economic opportunity through improved level of service and improved travel time consistency.

Author

Aline Laborde | WSP

Aline is an ITS Engineer involved in the detailed design of the Bruce Highway Road Operations Improvement Project. She has 8 years of experience working in the Intelligent Transport Systems and Electrical (ITS&E) industry. Principally focused with the end-to-end implementation and integration of ITS&E public infrastructure solutions for Road Operations, namely Busways, Motorways and Arterial roads. Aline is experienced with Road Operations for both metropolitan and rural environments and has experience working with transport clients through detailed design and delivery for large scale transport projects such as M1 Managed Motorway Upgrade and Western Freeway VSLS.