What the UN’s Decade of Road Safety means for our communities

Kevin John

Director of Market Development | Matrix Traffic and Transport Data,  ASIA PACIFIC region

Kevin John is the Director of Market Development at Matrix Traffic and Transport Data for the ASIA PACIFIC region.

In this role he utilizes his significant management, marketing, business development, data analysis and reporting expertise to expand the company’s market presence in the traffic and transport industry.

His past career includes senior business development roles at NRMA and consulting director for Business Invigoration,

In his role as Consulting Director, he provided specialist marketing and business development consulting to several blue-chip Australian companies in the transport & motoring industry, helping these companies to develop new business opportunities.

Kevin holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Queensland and a Masters of Transport Management from the University of Sydney.

He is passionate about Active Transport and contributing towards a more environmentally friendly world for all of us to enjoy now and into the future

Ingrid Johnston

Chief Executive Officer | Australasian College of Road Safety

 

Dr Ingrid Johnston is a passionate advocate for social justice and health. With an extensive network across government, academia and non-government organisations, Ingrid is an experienced and accomplished advocate and campaigner.

Ingrid was appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the Australasian College of Road Safety in May 2021 and is actively engaged in supporting the advocacy and knowledge sharing work of the College members. Ingrid is also a Director on the Board of the Climate and Health Alliance, a coalition of health care stakeholders with a mission to build a powerful health sector movement for climate action and sustainable healthcare.

Knowledge Exchange

Road safety in Australia, is at an intersection of opportunity. The Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021-2030 was proclaimed by a UN Resolution with a target to reduce road traffic deaths and injuries by 50% by 2030. The Global Plan that underpins the Decade of Action was released October 2021 and is the guide for governments to implement their road safety strategies at national level. 

The UN General Assembly high-level meeting on improving global road safety will be held in July 2022 with the theme of securing a decade of action and delivery. 

Australia released its National Road Safety Strategy (NRSS) 2021-30, in December 2021, setting out Australia's road safety objectives over the next decade, and confirming the governments' commitment to achieve "Vision Zero", the elimination of deaths and serious injuries on our roads by 2050. The accompanying Action Plan is yet to be finalised. 

Join me in a discussion of each of these key developments and how they contribute to a unique intersection of opportunity for Australian road safety. 

Prof Simon Washington 

Co-founder and CEO | Advanced Mobility Analytics Group

After 25 years of researching the causes and treatments of crashes, Simon left a successful academic career to use his cumulative knowledge and experience to support a needed paradigm shift in transport safety, operations, and planning. As CEO of AMAG, he is leading a team of transport engineers, AI experts, and programmers to build a suite of SaaS products that will enable transport professionals to plan, manage, and operate safer, smarter cities. Most importantly, the SMART platform enables governments to abandon their reliance on crash data as a primary means to inform decision making, and providing evidence-based insights before crashes occur.

Simon, in conjunction with the other co-founders of AMAG Tarek Sayed and Shimul Haque, have been proving this transformative technology for more than a decade, applying their collective skills in statistical and econometric methods, AI, and machine learning, and transport engineering. With testing, development, and validation in more than 30 cities across 8 countries, this proactive life-saving technology is for the first time commercially available.

Simon is an internationally recognised transport engineer, having been employed at some of the top engineering universities globally over the past 25 years. He has held leadership roles at UC Berkeley (Director, Safe Transportation Research and Education Centre), QUT (Discipline Lead) and UQ (Head of School). Simon has co-authored more than 300 published peer reviewed papers and a statistics textbook in its 3rd edition, and his work has been referenced more than 15,000 times by other researchers–positioning him as one of the most highly cited road safety authorities globally.

 

Simon Washington Professor Chief Executive Officer Advanced Mobility Analytics Group simon@amagroup.io Professor Simon Washington is the Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Mobility Analytics Group Pty Ltd (AMAG). AMAG is using AI and video analytics to solve safety challenges for governments that crash-based methods cannot. He earned a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of California at Davis and is recognized internationally for his contributions in behavioral econometrics applied in the areas of transport safety and risk across all road users, urban planning, and travel behavior. Prior to AMAG, Professor Washington held leadership roles as Head of the School of Civil Engineering, University of Queensland and as Director of the Safe Transportation Research & Education Centre at UC Berkeley. In 2019 before leaving academia Simon was recognized by The Australian as the top academic in Transport within Australia. Simon has won numerous best paper awards recognizing his research contributions and his cumulative work has been cited more than 15,000 times by other researchers. He is lead author on Statistical and Econometric Methods for Transportation Data Analysis (3rd edition, CRC Press), which has been adopted in classrooms in over 20 countries. He is also co-author with Professor Dominique Lord of Safe Mobility: Challenges, Methodology, and Solutions, by Emerald Publishing Limited. https://www.aitpm.com.au/static/uploads/images/20210611-glennhuntphoto-1398-wfrjqhtocgqe.jpg The UNs Decade of Road Safety Means We Need New Approaches and Methods to Make a Difference "The UNs Decade of Road Safety implies that planners, managers, and operators of transport systems will need to work together to do a better job of saving lives and preventing injuries. Crashes have plateaued in many countries, and widely remain a leading cause of death for people under age 25. How can we do better? 

A starting position is that "Doing more of the same, or even incremental change, will not significantly address this problem”we need new methods, treatments, and strategies.

Without applying new methods, treatments, and strategies, our communities will continue to suffer from preventable crashes. The most important opportunities for improvement involve the prevention of high impact crashes that result in fatalities and injuries. 

Having spent my career understanding and improving the current suite of crash-based methods and understanding the causes and contributors to crashes, the answer is obvious: we must abandon our primary reliance on crash data for informing safety decision making. Continuing to rely on crashes to justify action (operational or management) is a circular argument fraught with underlying ethical problems. 

In the remainder of the presentation the theory and evidence on why and how the profession can successfully rely on critical conflicts instead of crashes to manage safety is discussed. These methodologies, which hold exceptional promise for delivering the UNs Decade of Road Safety objectives, is unparalleled in its ability to understand risk of vulnerable road users, in understanding the relationship between design, operations, and risk. The benefits of this technology and limitations will be discussed, with a pathway proposed for making this essential paradigm shift.  

 

Dean Rance

Policy Advisor | NRMA

 

Dean has a working background in consulting, academia and commercial roles across some of the most well-respected organisations in Australia. He has specialised qualifications in transport planning, infrastructure management, geography and finance which is a niche background enjoyed by very few professionals in Australia.

Dean currently leads the development of transport planning and mobility policy for the NRMA at a time of profound change in the sector.  Following the emergence of COVID in 2020, Dean led calls for a nationwide road safety infrastructure stimulus package highlighting that it would support employment in the short term, and result in long term road safety benefit outcomes.  Shortly after, a $1.8 billion road safety funding package was announced by the Federal Government.  

Other key projects Dean has been involved in include being the technical lead for TfNSW’s Walking Space Guidelines, as well as land use and demand modelling for WestConnex, the Sydney Metro and the Inner Sydney Regional Bicycle Network, environmental planning for Parramatta Light Rail, and integrated transport strategies for Inner West Council and Bayside Council.  

Dean has been invited to present at preeminent international transport conferences including the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research and the International Conference on Transport Survey Methods.  

Dean has particular interests in integrated transport planning and policy, active transport, road safety and behavioural science in transport.  

A Better Understanding of the Sources of Driver Frustration

Cyclists who ride through red lights make my blood boil

Seeing a driver on their mobile phone gets on my goat

I hate it when I get cut off when driving

These are anecdotes we have all probably heard at some point.  But if a survey forced people into making trade-offs about frustrating behaviours, which behaviours come out as the most frustrating, and are there any identifiable patterns in those frustrating behaviours?  

Past research around driver frustration has relied strongly on Likert scales, however, results have been strongly impacted by acquiescence biases multiple studies have continuously shown that everything is frustrating.  In a world-first methodology, researchers empirically identified 26 road user behaviours and utilised best-worst scaling to establish a relative ranking for the behaviours through multinominal logit modelling.  Best-worst scaling is a versatile and robust form of surveying which is more traditionally used in consumer research.  

In addition, respondents completed a range of demographic questions and a psychometric profile which established tendencies towards excitement, aggression and altruism whilst driving.  Latent class modelling found no patterns between the frustrating behaviours and "hard" demographics such as age and gender.  However, three distinct psychological profile patterns were identified with respect to the frustrating behaviours.  The outcomes of the latent class modelling suggest that Government road safety campaigns, including the infamous "no one thinks big of you" campaign, have historically tended to be ineffective with respect to their stated objectives.  

Come along and participate in a discussion which will be sure to challenge contemporary perceptions about driver frustration.  As a preview, media, social media and community sentiment would generally have you think "seeing a cyclist ride through a red light" is "very frustrating"¦ it ranked lowly at 19th out of the 26 behaviours identified.