In this issue

This issue addresses two defining threads of today’s transport landscape: one longstanding and persistent (road safety), and the other emerging and transformative (data and data-driven solutions).

Road safety remains the transport sector’s unending fire. It is now abundantly clear that the 2030 target to halve road deaths and serious injuries will not be achieved. Current trends point to increasing, rather than decreasing, fatalities and hospitalisations. This is despite the transport profession’s immense goodwill, expertise, commitment and focus, and an estimated $10–20 billion invested in road safety since 2020. New approaches are needed to complement existing efforts.

While the future of data may be uncertain, two things are clear: there is a vast amount of it, and it continues to grow rapidly. Conservative—though necessarily speculative—estimates suggest humanity held around 0.1–0.3 zettabytes (300 million terabytes) of recorded information in 2000. Today, the global stock is approximately 180–220 zettabytes, representing a thousand-fold increase. It is growing by around 20–25% annually, adding roughly 40 zettabytes each year and doubling every three to four years.

Data itself is not the goal; its value lies in generating insights that lead to new and better solutions. This issue focuses explicitly on solutions enabled by the availability and application of diverse data sources.

The issue starts with a mini focus of four papers on road safety and follows up with several solutions-focussed papers.

Tran’s opinion paper examines the wicked problem of the growing road toll and argues for a deeper systems-thinking approach. Fox and Hand then outline NTRO’s initiative to tackle transport safety across the Asia Pacific region through a broader systems lens.

Chen revisits 30 years of crash data to assess the suitability of the traditional five-year analysis window. Green presents a new approach for improving safety at high-speed rural intersections.

Four papers focus on data-driven improvements to infrastructure performance and management more broadly.  These solutions cover a range of aspects from real-time monitoring of rail ballast health (Lin et al.), to use of residual risk approaches to improve asset management practice (Kurian and O’Connor), to optimisation of bridge maintenance (Kutadinata et al.) and system-focussed data frameworks for network-wide road monitoring (Wang et al.)

Finally, in an invited paper from Chile, Professor Alvaro Gonzalez outlines a road dust management system for mine haul roads, drawing on his extensive experience with these specialised environments.