AP-G84/04 Best practice in road use data collection, analysis ... - WIM

Accessed by AR - ARRB TRANSPORT RESEARCH on 04 Feb 2005
Austroads 2004
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Best Practices in Road Use Data Collection, Analysis and Reporting
Road authorities have undertaken correlation work on WIM data with classified counts to determine
equivalent standard axle factors and other data for pavement deterioration modelling. According to
Transit New Zealand, a key issue is that the storage, retrieval and processing of the large amount
of WIM data consume a lot of time and stretches the capacity of the computer system managing
the data.
5.3 Public-Private Partnership
The future development of road use data as a corporate asset is dependent on how much data
collection and management is carried out by the government sector. Budgetary constraints within
RAs may limit a data collection program. Many data collection activities have also been
outsourced. At the same time, the private sector may see opportunities to participate in the data
collection program, add value and market the data as a commercially viable business.
The current Austroads Intelligent Access Program (IAP) is an example of exploiting this publicprivate
partnership (Koniditsiotis 2003). This project invites third party service providers (the
private sector) to monitor in real time the compliance of heavy vehicles in following jurisdictional
regulations such as speed, load and route access. In exchange for being monitored with the use
of ITS technologies such as on-board GPS units, the transport industry expects to gain a
concession in accessing a road network. The service provider charges the transport industry for
tracking vehicles that subscribe to the service, and also have the freight/heavy vehicle data that
can potentially be another source of income. The IAP is currently in the early stages of
implementation after a two-year feasibility study.
Integration and analysis of these new sources of data will be costly and clear business cases will
be required to support investment in this area. Progress in data fusion will most likely occur in
close consultation and cooperation with users to ensure that specific customer-driven traffic data
needs are being met in aggregating such data. In most cases, there will not be one single user,
but potentially multi-user scenarios, bringing benefits, for example, to traffic management
operations as well as to road users who want to know the impact of incidents along their routes.
Other similar public-private business models have been promoted for the future development of
various ITS services. These services include, in particular, the provision of travel time information
(see, e.g. Karl et al. 2003). Others could be speed camera operation and administration, toll roads,
operations of traffic information centre.
These trends require policy and pricing decisions for RAs in terms of the extent of private sector
involvement and price or cost of services or data to be provided to the private sector. Road
authorities at present adopt a variety of policies on this issue. Some have gone further down the
path of out-sourcing and are charging fees for providing data to other parties. A best practice on
this issue has yet to be developed, but the emerging trends suggest that the public-private
partnership could be a win-win business model.