Australian and New Zealand roads are already being used by commercially available vehicles fitted with driver assistance systems such as Lane Keeping Assist (LKA), Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Traffic Jam Assist (TJA) and Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR). There had been limited prior work to understand the real-world performance of these systems on Australian and New Zealand roads or the implications on and requirements for infrastructure quality.  These trials sought to close that knowledge gap to enable infrastructure owners and operators to better prepare roads for these vehicle technologies and the benefits they may bring, such as improved safety.

Lessons learned to inform the conduct of trials

• Infrastructure owners and operators found relevant lessons learned from trialling the performance of commercially available vehicle systems, not only from the developmental technologies that are often the focus of other trial initiatives.

Lessons learned that inform future technology deployments

• There is variance in the performance of driver assistance systems between different makes and models and vehicles.
• There is a relationship between the performance of the driver assistance systems and the quality of infrastructure elements such as line marking, traffic signs and other infrastructure attributes such as pavement cracks.
• Although the performance of driver assistance systems was generally good on high quality road such as motorways, there were still situations where performance suffered.  Causes were often associated with infrastructure design rather than quality, for example the layout of line marking can cause challenges even when the quality of the lines is good.
• There is merit in infrastructure design and quality standards considering the needs of the driver assistance systems.
• Individual project reports (linked below) provide information on the specific findings from each of the trial projects.

Links to project lessons learned and / or benefit assessment reports

ARRB summary report on EastLink phase one trials

EastLink trials article in Infrastructure Magazine September 2017 edition

Transurban findings from Victorian phase one trials

Transurban findings from New South Wales trials

Transurban findings from Queensland trials

Curtin-Monash Accident Research Centre report on the readiness of rural Western Australian roads

Links to any other supporting project reports

Transurban website of trials in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland

Austroads report on infrastructure required to support automated driving on rural and metropolitan highways and freeways

Austroads report on a field audit of infrastructure quality on rural and metropolitan highways and freeways

Austroads report on implications of pavement markings for machine vision

Austroads report on guidance and readability criteria for Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) systems reading electronic signs

Austroads report on implications of TSR systems for road operators