Bridging Gaps

Prime Mover:  What’s the background of the NTRO?

Michael Caltabiano: NTRO was created as the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) in 1960 by the Commissioners of Main Roads, so it’s owned by the states, the territories and the Commonwealth of Australia. ARRB, now the National Transport Research Organisation (NTRO) is the hub of national expertise in pavement engineering and asset management, bridges and bridge maintenance, and all the hard engineering to build roads.

It was a grant-funded organisation and the Commissioners would determine the priorities, and the organisation would go and deliver the outcomes for them.

Sixty years later we have now transitioned from the ARRB to the NTRO. We’re an organisation owned by Governments but we are not grant funded by the public purse. Those Commissioners are now Heads of Departments of Transport, and they have airports, ports, road networks and rail systems to look after.  We’ve doubled the size of the organisation from where we were ten years ago and we’re funded on a fee for service basis. We’re now have an annual revenue of about $65m a year, eight years ago we were doing $30 million.

PM: What are the main areas for focus?

MC: We are focussed on four areas: assets, resilience, safety and sustainability.

The asset owners are the people of Australia through governments, so we focus on asset management, making sure the owners are getting the best value for money out of maintenance programs and delivering better whole of life outcomes for the assets.

Resilience for NTRO is all about thinking differently and providing solutions, so things such as bridges and roads don’t get washed away. Our transport system must remain open for longer in spite of external factors impacting on the network. Bridges are being required to last longer and as a consequence we need to reimagine the new loading environments on old bridges and how we can keep them open for longer and how do we deliver that change safely.

In terms of road safety, we are one of the few countries in the world where deaths are going up, in spite of new vehicles, new roads and new major networks, and that is just not acceptable.

The fourth area is sustainability, not just around using recycled materials and making sure that we’re more sustainable for the planet, but it’s also about financial models that deliver sector wide sustainability.

PM: The road transport industry makes significant contributions through Road User Charge payments and recently the Productivity Commission has suggested phasing out the Diesel Fuel Rebate scheme. How can the industry be expected to pay more than it already is or is this an incentive to go low or zero emission vehicles?

MC: We’ve got economists in the NTRO business who are scratching their heads because it’s an immature space in Australia both from a policy sense and a practical delivery outcome and there’s a reason for that. We’re a very big country and rural and regional Australia will, under a universal RUC environment, disproportionally pay for the use of low volume roads because inevitably the funding goes where the population base is.

It’s a conundrum that the governments are facing. There are reducing excise revenues through the efficiency of the Euro 6 trucks, and it will reach a point where they will have to do something. We’ve been articulating that action is needed for some time now. Putting all the eggs into the one basket of a zero-emission electric fleet is not going to work in Australia, it’s just too big a country. There’s a lot of work to be done before it’s just as simple as switching to EV’s.

PM: Should the governments get involved in the charging network?

MC: Governments don’t own fuel stations, so why would they own recharging stations? Their job is to enable, through grid accessibility, charging stations to be developed by the private sector when the use case is there. Currently, each state is doing its own thing in the absence of the Commonwealth having a national plan and the outcomes are sub optimal. There’s not enough strategic thinking in a space that requires a truly national approach.

PM: What can be done to minimise the danger where trucks use railway crossings?

MC: This issue is significantly high on our safety agenda and there will be some announcements very soon.

Technology, including in-cab technology, will help a lot in the solutions around those level crossing interactions. We did a project in regional Queensland, regional Victoria and New Zealand where we put digital cameras utilising AI at some unsignalised rail crossings accompanied with variable message boards to tell road users, particularly heavy vehicles, how far away the train is in distance and time, and so they can decide whether to stop or proceed.

The challenge is getting the parties involved together to agree on the pathway to deploy the technology at scale.

PM: What are the main on-going projects for NTRO?

MC: It’s three things. First is safety. We’ve got a massive road safety problem in this country, which is largely behavioural. When you look at the statistics around Australia there are some local government areas where the only deaths in the last seven years on the road network have been middle aged men. The shift has gone from the 18-24 year-olds to men over 50, experienced, probably in modern cars but are the ones who are most at risk.

We are looking at questions like: Why are deaths occurring and what does the data show? Who will we communicate the road safety message to? How are we seeking to deliver behaviour change? What’s going on in rural and regional Australia where a high percentage of these deaths happen?

The most urgent problem to solve is not about changing speed limits from 50 to 40 or 30 in our urban areas. It’s about focussing on the problem we are trying to solve, which is in regional and rural Australia, typically a high-speed run-off the road and hitting a tree incident.

The second focus for NTRO is the journey of economic productivity around the skills challenge in the workforce. In the heavy vehicle sector, we’re 27,000 drivers short of where we need to be. One of the pathways to a solution is autonomy. So how do we get autonomous vehicles, including buses and trucks, into the network to support the economic productivity and the growth of the nation? Other nations are already well advanced in this space but our infrastructure, legislative frameworks, use cases and delivery of real-world autonomous vehicles to test these use cases has not been given the priority it needs. We’re ten years behind and counting.

The third issue we are zooming in on is construction methods and construction quality and with that comes the focus on resilience. Looking at what we are building and how are we making sure we’re building for the future and that we’re building in a smart and cost-effective way that delivers resilient outcomes.

Costs have exploded in the construction space. We’re not getting value for money in the road and rail construction space as a community. We can’t be serious about delivering better quality outcomes unless we link that to a value for money construction environment. We’ve got to bring the costs down and that’s about understanding risk and applying engineering skills and principles and not doing what we’ve always done. We cannot be in that environment anymore. NTRO are in a position to be the enablers of change and the deliverer of new standards and better ways of constructing our infrastructure.

Eighteen years ago, China had zero kilometres of high-speed rail, yet they’ve now got 48,000 kilometres of 360 km/hour high speed rail. We have just commenced the journey of building high speed rail but at a unit cost of $464 million per kilometre, which is not sustainable.

It’s 2026 and technology has moved on and material science has moved on. Our capacity to think through problems has moved on. We must now deliver the implementation of innovation as the enabler of a smarter, safer more connected future.