Innovative data approach to reducing road trauma recognised in multiple Australian awards

July 19, 2024; Melbourne, VIC:  Global professional services company, GHD, has been the recipient of multiple Australian awards for its innovation in disruptive road intelligence insights. In conjunction with its client, GHD has recently been announced as the winner of the Technology Award and the Founders Award for Outstanding Achievement at the 13th annual Australian Road Safety Awards 2024, as well a merit in the Australian Information Industry Association's Victorian iAwards 2024 in the category of Government and Public Sector Solution of the Year.

GHD co-designed a new approach to assessing road trauma risk using connected vehicle data and applied this approach to successfully evaluate an AUD20M road safety infrastructure program. The evaluation produced powerful new data-driven insights and metrics that inform road safety priorities, achieved world first insights into driver behaviour through road safety treatments, and provided additional new systemic insights for traffic design and urban planning.

GHD’s AI Centre of Excellence is pioneering applications of big data across different industries and connected vehicle data is one such emerging disruptive innovation in road management and usage. Compass IoT, an Australian road intelligence company, provided anonymised connected vehicle data for the evaluation. With strategic direction from GHD’s transport engineering team, GHD Digital analysed the data to provide an innovative approach that holistically measured speed and traffic behaviour, not just at treatment locations, but along the entire length of treated roads, and throughout surrounding streets. 

The multidisciplinary team spanning GHD’s road safety expertise and GHD Digital’s big data analytics and location intelligence specialists, enabled new conversation-changing insights into pedestrian fatality risk, ‘near misses’ as locations where future accidents are more likely, and traffic kinetic energy distribution across a neighbourhood. These road safety insights are critical concepts in international road safety but have never been visualised geospatially before. 

The world first insights enable optimisation of safety treatment investment to achieve safe speed management outcomes, with new understanding of how drivers respond to different engineering designs, including multiple road safety treatments separated along the same street. The addition of “near miss” patterns in driver behaviour provides a new lead indicator for predicting and prioritising locations where accidents have not yet occurred but are likely in future, enriching the data available from crash analysis and spot speed checks. 

With a 10.4 percent increase in road fatalities in the last 12 months according to the Office of Road Safety, the Australian federal and state governments are strongly committed to improving road safety. These new tools augment existing crash investigation analyses, providing new lead indicators to address those goals.

“Evaluating road safety risk from the perspective of the vehicle, not the roadside, will fundamentally alter how we address road trauma in our communities. We don’t need people to die to know where the hazards are greatest. Using this technology, we know where to prioritise intervention before an accident happens,” said Adam Wilmot, Project Director Roads and Data, GHD.

“As new industry data sources emerge, they present opportunities to tackle some of our biggest challenges from new perspectives. The potential of connected vehicle data to address road trauma risk has now been proven, in an approach that can be applied everywhere. We are delighted to be playing an innovative role in addressing road trauma risk reduction, at a global scale,” said Sarah Dods, Advanced Analytics and AI Leader, GHD Digital.

With the success in Australia, GHD and Compass IoT are already expanding its partnership and solutions into the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and North American markets.

Acerca de GHD

GHD es una empresa líder en servicios profesionales que opera en los mercados mundiales de agua, energía y recursos, medio ambiente, infraestructura y edificaciones, y transporte. Comprometidos con la visión de garantizar que el agua, la energía y las comunidades sean sostenibles para las futuras generaciones, GHD ofrece soluciones en consultoría, servicios digitales, ingeniería, arquitectura, medio ambiente y construcción a clientes del sector público y privado. Fundada en 1928 y propiedad de sus trabajadores, GHD cuenta con una red de más de 12.000 profesionales en más de 160 oficinas en cinco continentes.