West Australia’s booming growth makes transport management and road safety even more important issues, according to a leading authority on transport monitoring and data collection. West Australia’s booming growth makes transport management and road safety even more important issues, according to a leading authority on transport monitoring and data collection. John Reid, whose Austraffic group already operates in every Australian state as well as New Zealand, says the increasing population and demand for natural resources puts greater demand on land use, housing and urban development, roads and transport.
Mr Reid, who is opening an Austraffic office in Balga, WA, says, “More people equate to more vehicles, with obvious impacts for road safety, road usage and access to freight corridors. “Moving people and goods safely are significant issues for any region, and they multiply considerably when you take into account that Western Australia has 52,468 km of sealed roads, 99,794 km of unsealed/other roads, and 25,000 km of forestry roads across approximately 1/3 of Australia’s entire land mass.”
Western Australia’s population is the fastest growing in Australia with a 9.1% increase in Perth’s population from 2006-2007. This growth is expected to continue, bringing the state’s population to almost 3 million by 2031 with over 2 million living in the Perth metropolitan area.
“Road safety and traffic management have been recognised through Vision Zero, developed by the WA Government and the Road Safety Council. But to address an issue properly you have to understand it and that is where traffic monitoring and data collection is so crucial to the decision making process,” said Mr Reid.
Austraffic, the Australian leader in traffic and transport monitoring techniques and technology, has been collecting and delivering high quality traffic and transport data for over 25 years, enabling effective data solutions and credible decisions with respect to transport planning and traffic management. Austraffic’s services include: manual and video counts, automatic traffic counts, origin destination and travel time surveys, intersection counts, road lighting audits, public transport surveys and data analysis.
Austraffic can assist you to decide the best survey type for your needs and has purpose-designed software packages that produce extensive menu-driven data reports on all vehicle types to clearly present a comprehensive data profile that is easy to interpret.
As printed in the December 2008 issue of the Australian Institute of Traffic Planning and Management. www.aitpm.com.au