National Road Safety Strategy Archives

This project aims to enhance the safety of shared paths for active transport modes like cycling, eRideables and pedestrians, through a combination of video analytics and community-sourced incident data.

By leveraging UWA’s cutting-edge RoadSense Video Analytics software, the project will systematically collect videos and analyse observational data of user behaviours, movement patterns, and potential conflict hotspots. This objective video data will be complemented by a crowdsourced incident reporting web portal that is mobile phone friendly, to increase the ease of reporting for users. The portal will also incorporate a searchable database to systematically curate both video-derived and community-reported incident and near-miss data, addressing the underreporting challenge and facilitating further research.

Key outcomes of this project include a framework for ongoing systematic safety data collection, reports on identified issues and baseline “before” conditions, and improved design guidelines for safer and more inclusive shared paths. Find more information on the National Road Safety Action Grants Program which is funding this project from this link.

Globally, the older population is rapidly increasing, which has implications for road safety, particularly as most older adults continue to drive for convenience and the associated improved health outcomes. Visual fields play a crucial role in safe driving, as visual field loss can affect the detection of objects in the periphery, judging distance and speed, maintaining lane position in a curve, and anticipatory skills while driving.

Current visual standards for driving, authorised by licensing authorities, are based on visual acuity and visual fields. However, these consensus-derived standards lack robust scientific evidence on the association between visual field loss, driving ability and crash risk.

To address this limitation, we propose an innovative population-based study leveraging a large-scale specialised ophthalmic database of visual fields tests comprising 606,230 records from 92,215 participants, already linked to various population-based administrative databases, including police-reported crash data, hospitalisation records, and licensing data. The detailed nature of the visual field database surpasses any existing study in scale and depth both nationally and internationally. This wealth of data will enable us to determine precise estimates of crash risk and explore associations between the severity and location of visual field loss (e.g. superior versus inferior) that could be used to inform road safety and licensing authorities regarding fitness to drive in WA, Australia and worldwide.

Find more information on the National Road Safety Action Grants Program, which is funding this project.

National Road Safety Strategy

Enhancing Active Transport Infrastructure Through Video Analytics and Community Reporting

A Population-Based Study Assessing the Impact of Visual Field Loss on Motor Vehicle Crashes