Journal of Integrated Mobility

This article outlines some of the highlights of the program for the 2025 edition of the conference.

Extreme climatic and weather events pose significant threats to road infrastructure, leading to profound social, environmental and economic repercussions. This article presents two case studies of recent NTRO research.

The Westport project is the Western Australian (WA) Government’s long-term program to design and deliver new container port facilities at Kwinana, along with integrated road and rail transport corridors. It is a very significant undertaking, involving a comprehensive supply chain redesign for the state and leveraging the unique position of government ownership of the port, rail, road and much of the land.

Transitioning our transportation systems to use renewable sources of energy is a key element of reaching emission reduction goals and climate targets.

Maintaining airport pavements is becoming ever more challenging. Increased air traffic and aircraft sizes are putting even higher strains on the pavements. As a result, more attention is being given to how well airport pavements hold up and how their condition can be assessed.

Track work inside the rail corridor is inherently high risk. Current practice often requires personnel to enter the danger zone to install safety and isolation equipment before works commence. This, coupled with the projected long-term increase in network utilisation, creates a scenario of foreseeable increased worker risk that should be addressed.

Competency is an essential determinant in whether a task or activity is completed successfully and efficiently, and can be defined as a combination of skills, job attitude and knowledge that is reflected in behaviour that can be observed, measured, and evaluated.

In road safety, the “killer tree” problem refers to a head-on collision with a pole/tree and contributes to 30-50% of Australian road fatalities (Morris et al. 2001). As such, hazardous trees are a component of the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) star rating process for road safety inspections, impact assessments and designs.

Sustainability is important for many reasons but fundamentally it is not about what we should do for the environment, it is something we must do to preserve our quality of life and of all life on the planet. It is particularly important for road tunnels because compared to a road at grade, a road tunnel has a substantially larger carbon footprint due to the significant efforts required to build it and the nonstop operation of its systems through its life cycle.

Addressing the impact of human activity on the environment has been increasingly at the forefront of academic and industry research activities. Although many industries are developing means to tackle this, few have the capacity to affect it at such a scale as infrastructure.

One of the most advantageous applications of non-destructive pavement deflection testing is to determine the modulus of pavement layers and subgrade using back-calculation. The back-calculation of modulus can be achieved using an iterative process.

The Australian Road Research Board (ARRB), now operating as the National Transport Research Organisation (NTRO), recently pioneered the application of road survey technology to airports. ARRB’s established expertise in road survey technology has a long history of innovation and improvement to provide a repeatable assessment of the condition of roads.

The NTRO Ports division focuses on not only the here and now – applying the incredible research and technical project-based skills gathered over 60 years to the port sector – but also on the emerging horizon issues, both challenges and opportunities.

To represent NTRO Rail internationally, Donald Shackleton from NTRO’s Asset Performance team ventured to South Korea in early 2023. Following his travels, Donald recounted the trip and the insights he gained from the experience via a recorded interview. This article provides a written account of this interview.

Australiasia’s rail networks plays a significant role in keeping the country connected, supporting the movement of people, products and services both locally and nationally.

Every year, Federal and State governments spend billions on road pavement rehabilitation because of road failures happening worldwide. Environmental factors such as moisture and temperature are identified as the significant reasons for these road failures. Unbound pavements with thin sprayed seals, which amount to about 90% of the overall Australian road network, are more susceptible to environmentally driven deterioration coupled with the effects of traffic loads. Unbound granular materials (UGMs) used to construct the base, and subbase layers are severely vulnerable to performance losses due to moisture variations. Subgrade strength is also adversely affected by moisture changes.

This article is the first in a series aimed at outlining the concept of Social License as it pertains to operation and management of road networks. Social license is a term that is used colloquially as well as in its formal sense, so this paper starts with an exposition of social license and its relevance to another colloquially and formally used term – asset management.

While there is no mandate in Australia to investigate road incidents, all severities of road incident deserve to be investigated. This is because the information secured provides enormous potential for learning and continual improvement in strategy, policy, designs, standards, guidelines and practices, across all elements of the Safe System. Similarly, road-related incidents can lead to criminal and/or civil proceedings (litigation) where the facts of the incident – in simple terms, what happened, the infrastructure provision and its condition, and decisions reached in managing and maintaining a road – are typically examined in detail.

The deterioration rate of a pavement is a good indicator of pavement performance. Pavements are expected to deteriorate over time under traffic loading and climatic conditions. However, the deterioration process is often slowed due to the influence of surface maintenance and can be reversed due to the restorative impact of rehabilitation works.

Whilst crumb rubber asphalt products are available in Australia, they are not widely adopted by road owners for resurfacing existing pavements or constructing new pavements. A key concern leading to this low acceptance is the lack of credible evidence demonstrating that crumb rubber asphalt can meet the performance standard required by road owners.

Strong road transport networks underpin the social, economic and cultural fabrics of nations. From Roman roads to Eisenhower’s US Interstate Highway System, nations have flourished with well-developed transport networks.

Rail vandalism can cause a variety of social, time and monetary impacts on rail operations. In 2019, MTM estimated that $10 million is spent annually on tackling vandalism across the rail network (MTM 2019).

The Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) engaged ARRB via the National Asset Centre of Excellence (NACoE) program to undertake project R104 to evaluate the impacts of smart motorway treatments on the Bruce Highway and three other infrastructure projects in the vicinity of the study area.

In 2017, the Victorian Government released Victoria’s Value Creation and Capture Framework. The framework establishes an expectation on government agencies, such as MRPV, to think beyond the core project outcomes of a project (e.g. reducing congestion and travel times, improving safety, connecting communities) and consider the wider opportunities available.

The transportation field has many touchpoints across a range of disciplines, many of which are interdependent. The gaps in our knowledge needed to optimise our transport system are many fold. The speed with which the context in which transport is needed can vary too – e.g. a global pandemic - creating different gaps, and sometimes rendering existing knowledge gaps moot.

The long-term pavement performance (LTPP) observational study conducted from 1994 to 2018, in conjunction with the accelerated loading facility (ALF) experimental data, has developed robust deterministic mechanistic-empirical road deterioration models for the gradual deterioration phase for flexible pavement arterial roads in Australia.

ARRB was able to help Mornington Peninsula Shire Council (MPSC) demonstrate to its stakeholders, community and project funders that their investment was well made, delivering significant traffic and economic benefits.

While ride-hailing has become ubiquitous in most cities, there is a dearth of studies using individual survey level data to better understand what drives the demand for such services.

2020 has been a year like no other for road travel in Australia. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic at the start of the year led governments to impose restrictions on the movement of people in all Australian states and territories by March. With people allowed to leave home only for specified essential purposes, it quickly became obvious to the casual observer that vehicular traffic flows were greatly reduced across much of the network, and congestion had all but disappeared.

A key factor in the performance of bituminous seals, prior to needing maintenance or replacement, is the aging characteristics of the seal itself. The ability to assess the age of in situ binders through a swift and simple technique is therefore advantageous in supporting maintenance and rehabilitation strategies across Australia’s sealed road network.

Other than in the medical field, the phrases “research and development” and “race against the clock” are not often used together. However, Australia is facing a crisis in terms of the 3.5 million tons of plastic we use every year, and the need to find domestic means of using it following a looming ban on exporting Australian waste.

A great deal has been written about ‘the future’ when it comes to a number of things, but particularly so with transport, or its ‘mobility’ embodiment. What is not always apparent is (a) how rapidly change will take place and (b) how profound change could or needs to be to realise the full potential of the opportunity.