Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot: Final reports

The Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot (ICVP) project, running between September 2020 and 2021, has been Australia’s largest trial of a Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS). This iMOVE project was led by the Department of Transport and Main Roads’ (Queensland) Cooperative and Automated Vehicle Initiative (CAVI), with research from QUT’s CARRS-Q centre. The project is now completed, and final reports of the research findings are available from this page.

This trial saw more than 350 participants have their vehicles retrofitted with connected vehicle technology for nine months. In the trial, this technology allowed those vehicles to communicate with roadside infrastructure and transport management systems.

The C-ITS technology also enables vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication , but this was tested in a simulator due to the reduced likelihood of in-field interactions.

Driver assistance: Screen and audio alerts

As a result of these communications, screen and audio messages within the participants’ vehicles provided ‘heads-up’ and ‘take-action’ warnings in the following situations :

• Turning Warning for Vulnerable Road Users – alerts there is a risk of a conflict with a pedestrian or cyclist that is crossing at a signalised intersection
• Advanced Red Light Warning – alerts there is a risk of violating the red light at a signalised intersection, unless the driver brakes
• Road Works Warning – alerts drivers if speed is unsafe for upcoming road works. Also alerts drivers if they exceed the speed limit within the roadworks
• Back-Of-Queue Warning (motorways) – alerts the driver if their current speed is not appropriate for a downstream back of queue (congestion)
• Road Hazard Warning – alerts if the driving speed is not appropriate for a downstream hazard such as a crash of debris

Additionally, the In-Vehicle Speed advice provides drivers with information about the current speed limit – static, variable, school or roadworks – and is always displayed when system is active.
The following V2V warnings were tested with the use of a simulator:

• Slow/ Stopped Vehicle Warning – alerts the driver there is a risk of a rear-end collision with a slow/ stopped vehicle ahead
• Emergency Electronic Brake Light Warning – alerts the driver there is a risk of a rear-end collision with a vehicle braking hard ahead

Data from the drivers’ journeys was collected, and participants also provided a rating out of 10 for the five safety use cases.

All of this would provide a core data set to build a repeatable analysis methodology and evaluate safety benefits of C-ITS.

The numbers

Over the period of the field operational test the drivers logged more than 2.7 million kilometres of connected driving, which was collected over more than 49,000 driving hours and had 95,000 messages provided via the in-vehicle system.

For analysis, the drivers’ experience had some variation, remotely managed, based on their assigned role at installation and start date:

Drivers in the treatment group (90%) experienced the safety warnings for six months and no warnings for three months as baseline condition. The remaining 10% of drivers (the control group) did not experience any safety warnings. The analysis focused on comparing the driving profiles with and without warnings during the scenarios.

Data and analysis from the drivers in this project show that:

• Comparing occurrences of running a red light with and without the Advanced Red Light Warning, there was a 22% reduction when the in-car warning was enabled
• From driver behaviour in the pilot and the simulator study for the two vehicle-to-vehicle use cases, the project’s use-cases collectively show that C-ITS has the potential to reduce crashes by up to 20 per cent when adopted by all vehicles on Queensland’s road network
• Overall, the user perception of the use cases experienced was positive, and users believed the system helped make them more aware of the outside driving environment.

Report findings

This project extrapolated the data to make a wider assessment of the benefit of adding C-ITS more widely across a road network:

In a broader context, with a total of 526 fatalities and 20,826 serious injuries being reported from crashes on the South East Queensland (SEQ) road network over the five-year period of 1 July 2016 and 30 June 2021, the eight C-ITS use cases implemented in the ICVP could have prevented up to 101 fatalities and 4,198 serious injuries from crashes. This equates to an average of 20 fatalities and 840 serious injuries prevented each year in SEQ.

Download the reports

There are three summary reports from this project available for download:

• Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot: Summary of the Subjective Evaluation Study
• Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot: Summary of the Subjective Evaluation Study Findings
• Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot Safety Evaluation

These reports also cover findings from the associated project, Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot: Safety and user perceptions evaluation.

Click the buttons below to download the reports.

Two-page summary

Also available is a 2-page summary of the project and its findings.