ARTSA-I recently held a dinner meeting at which I talked with Dr Peter Sweatman about his career in heavy vehicle road safety.
Peter is an outstanding technical leader in the Australian heavy vehicle road transport sector.
Peter described our industry sectors’ history, achievements and potential to improve road safety using innovative vehicle types and technologies.
Peter’s passionate interest in heavy vehicle dynamics led him firstly to the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB which is now NTRO) and later to University of Michigan Transport Research Institute (UMTRI).
In the intermediate period he founded and led Roaduser Systems (later expanded to Roaduser International) that provided consulting services to the heavy vehicle industry in the domain of technical aspects of safety, innovation and compliance with regulations.
His professional work in Australia provided leadership that helped identify a regulatory reform path that fleet operators, regulators and road owners could accept to balance the competing forces of safety, productivity and the sharing of road by small and large vehicles.
Peter pointed out the intellectual connection that exists between people who manage roads and people who use heavy vehicles to move freight on those roads.
There is a common interest, even if it is often ‘testy’.
Australian highways have relatively thin pavements and so damage done by heavy vehicles is of central interest to road managers.
That intellectual connection underpinned collaborative work involving ARRB with the fuel-haul sector, which wanted to prevent rollovers, and the roadtrain sector, which wanted better road access. Vehicle performance together with road design determined the outcomes.
After studying mechanical engineering at a doctoral level, Peter took a position at ARRB to look at dynamic pavement loading by heavy trucks. An associate quipped he needed to be the ‘mechanic with a PhD’.
VicRoads had installed a weighbridge at Seymour in central Victoria and he spent a lot of time bouncing trucks on it to measure transients.
The basics were important. Later on, this work informed his work on technical standards for road friendly suspensions, which regulators linked to road access and higher mass limits.
The major fuel producers had their own fleets in Australia, and they were very concerned about tanker rollovers.
The Australian Institute of Petroleum (AIP) had contacted ARRB about tanker dynamics and this led to collaboration between ARRB, the AIP and eventually Hockney tankers.
Hockney used this collaboration to develop the ‘Thomas tanker’, which had a very low centre-of-mass height and was therefore world leading for rollover stability. State and territory governments owned the ARRB.
The focus of government was to keep pressure on the heavy truck industry. Peter had a different perspective, which was that the focus should be on improving heavy vehicle dynamic performance of trucks.
Now, as a senior engineer at ARRB, he could promote the concept of Performance-Based Standards and opening things up.
Peter’s international reputation grew at ARRB and later at RoadUser. He was interacting with researchers overseas who were working at improving the road handling of long and heavy vehicles.
It was clear to Peter that better designs rather than restrictive standards provided the path to better heavy vehicles.
Australia was good at doing economic studies into transport logistics productivity and governments were appraised about the possibilities to increase productivity. It was then clear to Peter that a project was needed to develop Performance-Based Standards that would underpin reforms that allowed high productivity vehicles onto urban roads.
The National Transport Commission (NTC) picked this idea up. State and Territory transport ministers authorised the work and eventually became comfortable with the proposed approach.
Twenty-five years later the resulting PBS scheme is operated by the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR). It was the key to getting HPVs onto main roads in built-up locations because it gave ministers confidence that the safety risks were being managed.
Peter’s technical leadership was important to getting ministers and vehicle owners to accept the PBS approach. Australia turned out to be a ‘risk taker’ with high productivity vehicles whereas the USA was not interested.
As Director of UMTRI, Peter was involved with many projects but notably worked on the potential for communications between vehicles and infrastructure via radio communications to improve road safety.
Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications have great potential to inform vehicles with autonomous vehicle systems about immediate risks.
The USA regulators had focused on the potential for autonomous vehicle responses to improve road safety. UMTRI conducted a major pilot investigation into the performance of a special fleet of connected (small) vehicles around the vicinity.
This was part of a larger investigation by the USA regulators into the potential for communication between vehicles to improve road safety. Draft regulations to mandate V2V communications on new cars in USA had been prepared by the Obama administration, but they were not proceeded with by the first Trump administration.
US regulators saw automated driving as the panacea for road trauma. Notably it only took one pedestrian fatality in Arizona for Uber to cancel its direct interest in autonomous driving.
Peter Sweatman, who is now an Enterprise Professor at Melbourne University, is the author of a very recent book Approaches to Road Safety that is published by CRC Press.
This wide-ranging work considers the potential safety benefits of intelligent transport systems and how they could be implemented to build the social contract that operators need to have with the community.
This talk with Dr Sweatman caused me to consider where Australia is at on the long and continuing journey to better heavy vehicle road safety.
Australia has mandated vehicle stability controls, autonomous emergency braking and lane departure warnings on new vehicles.
These advanced systems use sensors coupling to computer technology to measure the vehicle trajectory and to assess the risks of that trajectory. Route data and intervention data is routinely collected on board. The development of these technologies has come from overseas, mainly from Europe.
Australia is unlikely to be a leading developer of advanced safety technologies on heavy vehicles.
However, we could be a leader at using data about the locations of interventions of safety systems to inform the fleet operator and government about the dangerous locations in the road system.
Fleet operators could also be appraised about individual driver and truck performance.
The regulatory infrastructure that Australia has established for the Intelligent Access Program and vehicle accreditation monitoring could provide the basis for V2B (vehicle to base) monitoring. We have the world leading Australian Transport Certification Agency (TAC) as an asset to make standards for data sharing.
Using AI tools applied to routinely collected road data, many insights about safety, driver performance, freight management and fuel usage could be achieved. In many other industries employers monitor ‘near misses’ to be informed about the circumstances that result in hazards becoming high risk.
Our road freight logistics industry, which is by nature a dangerous one, could greatly benefit from information coming from V2B information.
Gaining insights from road data should not be a Big Brother exercise. Rather a collaborative project is needed that aims to provide insights to vehicle operators in the first instance and later aggregated data to road agencies.
ARTSA-I intends to develop a ‘white paper’ about the potential of V2B information to improve our world leading heavy road transport freight industry.
Peter Hart,
Chair ARTSA-I
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