PATREC RESEARCH Focus Areas

HIGH-IMPACT RESEARCH ACROSS TRANSPORT AND PLANNING.

SIX FOCUS AREAS, DRIVEN BY EVIDENCE AND THE EVOLVING NEEDS OF AUSTRALIA’S CITIES AND REGIONS.

PATREC research is guided by a framework for research projects to deliver high-impact outcomes. Although there are unavoidable overlaps and links between areas.

More recently, the CA Plan included a set of CA-specific focus areas, also with some overlaps with previous, more “traditional” focus areas. In this Plan (2026-2028), preceding focus areas from the Strategic Plan 2023-2025 (Table 1) and the CA Plan 2025-2028 (Table 2), have been consolidated, reorganised and refined in relation to changes in strategic drivers presented in section 4, broadened value proposition (section 3) and recent project priorities as the 2026-2028 research focus areas (Table 3). There are unavoidable overlaps and inter-linkages between focus areas.

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Research focus areas

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01

Integrated land use-transport planning & modelling

Improving land use and transport integration using systems-based, scenario-oriented, big data analytics approaches to longer term strategic planning, forecasting, evaluation and modelling, reducing the need to travel.

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02

Sustainable & Resilient Communities & Neighbourhoods

Planning and designing communities and neighbourhoods facilitating greater opportunity for increasing housing supply and quality, accessibility, climate resilience and adaptation and decarbonisation. 

Addressing structural barriers, risk and vulnerability assessment – to people, assets and infrastructure – and urban greening and other measures to mitigate heat island effects will amongst others contribute to more sustainable communities.

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03

Smarter Travel Decisions

Facilitating shifts to more energy-efficient, lower emissions and autonomous (shared, connected) modes and vehicles through deployment and integration of technology and behaviour change measures to enable more intelligent and connected transport choices.
 
Travel demand management mechanisms, enabled by technological advances, accelerate opportunities to reduce the need to travel, increase the share of low carbon modes and optimise use of existing infrastructure, deferring the need for new infrastructure.

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04

Technology for integrated freight system optimisation, decarbonisation & resilience

Smart technologies, digitisation, sensors, AV circular economy principles, applied to the freight system – hubs (including Ports), multi-modal network integration and first-last mile connectivity – for enhanced efficiency, safety, transition to net zero and adaption to climate risks and vulnerability.

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05

Intelligent Transport Systems & AI-Driven Mobility Analytics

Designing AI-based sensing, computer vision, analytics, and decision-support tools for transport network optimisation, road asset maintenance, safety enhancement, and infrastructure planning across multi-modal transport environments.

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06

Transport Infrastructure Decarbonisation & circularity

Transport infrastructure decarbonisation across the infrastructure life cycle includes reducing the footprint of new infrastructure and material requirements, using alternative low carbon and/or recycled materials applying circular economy principles and using low emission technologies in construction.

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research projects

latest projects

PATREC’s latest projects span urban mobility, land use, freight logistics and emerging transport technologies — all developed in close collaboration with government and research partners. Projects are listed by year of commencement.
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Enhancing Active Transport Infrastructure Through Video Analytics and Community Reporting

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.

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

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.

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AURIN WA Node to support CA in transport and land use planning research

A new PATREC program of research commenced in 2023 with three foundation projects, responding to WA government-identified need: Feasibility of battery-electric buses for regional school bus services; Mapping the Circular Economy of WA: Monitoring the contributions of circularity towards achieving Net Zero; and Accounting for carbon in the planning for new residential suburbs. Funding for second stages of these projects, as well as for new projects, has been agreed by PATREC and iMOVE CRC to be undertaken in 2025 and 2026.

Data and tools are a significant part of each project, providing the ideal opportunity to establish an enabling research infrastructure to support the new program of research: CATLUP – Climate action in transport and land use planning, comprising data and tools, as the basis for a longer-term indicator-based monitoring system to measure, monitor and drive enhanced resource efficiency and environmental performance towards net zero emissions of WA cities.
AURIN-WA will produce tools for transport and land use planning research, with a climate action focus. In turn these tools will deliver impact case studies across industry and government, and secondary users.

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