HoustonKemp at the Roads, Tolling and Technology conference 2022
Elaine Luc presented at the Roads, Tolling and Technology conference (organised by the ITS Australia) in Melbourne on 27 April 2022 on the implications and changes of traffic performance during the Covid-19 pandemic. Elaine presented insights into how road usage changed during the pandemic and what lessons can be learned for the future of road usage in Melbourne.
In particular, Elaine gave a deep dive into whether measures of road performance (speed, speeding and congestion) have changed across major metropolitan areas and key freight corridors in Melbourne. Some of her key findings include that:
- average speed across the Victorian road network increased from 55.7 to 57.3km/h between 2020 and 2021;
- average speed in the Greater Melbourne region was approximately 11 per cent lower than that in Victoria overall;
- compliance with speed limits, measured as the proportion of roads by length where there were no incidences of speeding, decreased significantly in 2021; and
- the key freight routes connecting Port of Melbourne to suburbs in the outer western and outer south-eastern regions in Melbourne remained congested over time, even during 2020 and 2021 when Melbournians experienced various periods of Covid-19 induced movement restrictions.
These findings are results of a deep-dive into the HERE traffic speed data provided by HERE Technologies, which is a leading global navigation system mapping company in the development of open location platform technologies. HERE traffic speed data is built on a database of over one trillion GPS data points, and are available across all roads in 57 countries, including the entirety of Australia.
For a complete set of findings presented by Elaine at the conference download her slide deck here.
For more information on the conference visit Roads, Tolls and Technology.