Australian innovation project leads world on automated data capture for RAP assessments

9 September 2021

Improving road safety performance is a priority for all levels of government in Australia and an iMOVE project is leading the way on innovative approaches to capturing road feature data for road safety Star Ratings.

The initiative is being led by Transport for NSW (TfNSW) and includes the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) and Australian geospatial data experts, Anditi.

The project, funded by the iMOVE Cooperative Research Centre, will deliver 20,000km of road attribute data for the State road network in New South Wales using TomTom’s MN-R data, as well as prove feature extraction techniques and machine learning for LiDAR data. The project aims to prove rapid, scalable and repeatable methods for road data extraction as part of iRAP’s global ‘AiRAP’ initiative.  The initiative will ultimately open up existing and emerging data sources for network-level road safety assessments throughout Australia and worldwide.

The project comes at an important time for Australian road agencies. The 2018-2020 National Road Safety Action Plan set targets for 90% of travel on national highways and 80% of travel on state highways to meet a 3-star or better safety standard by 2020.