This National Report describes the performance management framework within which Australian road authorities manage the nation's road networks, notes trends in performance and presents recent, significant innovations aimed at improving road system performance in meeting road user and community expectations. Australia's road network length is large in proportion to a small population concentrated principally on the East and South Eastern coasts of the mainland. Car ownership is high compared with other countries, as is the road freight task per head of population. Each of the three tiers of government - Commonwealth, State/Territory and Local - has a share of the responsibilities for funding and management of road provision and maintenance. Australian road authorities have developed a comprehensive performance management framework that identifies the principal economic, social, safety-related and environmental outcomes required by key stakeholders and defines performance indicators for both the road system and the road authorities. For practical application, the latter are synthesised into ten different categories of National Performance Indicators, which are reported upon every two years. Significant trends in road system performance over recent years have included improvements in road safety and road condition, but little reduction in road transport-related greenhouse gas emissions. Travel times have increased very little in the larger cities, whereas in smaller cities, travel times are lower but are increasing steadily towards those experienced in the larger conurbations. Australia has a strong culture of public consultation by road authorities, which is applied to the assessment of performance and to setting level of service and intervention standards for road networks. A User Satisfaction Index, based on surveys of road user assessments of system attributes grouped under eight categories, is among the performance indicators reported upon biennially. A major role of this report is to highlight recent Australian innovations that have contributed to improvement of road system performance in meeting road user and community expectations. The many innovations reported include examples in the areas of community consultation, network management, road freight evaluation, major infrastructure developments, road condition measurement and road safety. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Abstract