Australia’s economy runs on its roads

Australia’s economy runs on its roads, but infrastructure needs to get smarter, safer, and more efficient for the future

Road transport is the backbone of the Australian economy. Australia would grind to a halt without efficient, flexible, and safe fleets. Food would rot in warehouses, resources would not get to ports, and consumer goods remain stuck on docks.

The problem is that infrastructure investment isn’t matching the needs of a growing economy and expanding population, resulting in a situation where, as Infrastructure Australia reports, we have 1950s roads being used by 21st-century vehicles. This comes as a surprise with how much roadwork you see being completed about us every day, but maintaining and building roads is just one part of the picture.

Old road technologies act as a handbrake on economic growth, but businesses aren’t only feeling the impact. Consumers must also cope with higher prices, a significant concern during a cost-of-living crisis. The same Infrastructure Australia report cited a Productivity Commission study that found a 10 per cent reduction in gross vehicle weights due to poor roads resulted in a 12 per cent increase in the price of meat products in NSW. And that’s just one example.

There are two main ways to improve infrastructure and to make it safer and more efficient. The first is an increase in state and federal government spending on roads. Responsibility for roads is split between different levels of government, so coordination is needed to get the maximum bang for the buck. The second way to make roads better and safer is to make the roads themselves, and the vehicles using them, smarter.

The recent Federal Budget went some way to rectifying this investment problem, with the Australian Government allocating $120 billion over 10 years to infrastructure and roads. This includes funding for new roads and upgrades and maintenance for existing ones. Whether that’s enough money remains to be seen.

To keep pace with growth, smart roads and encouraging the development of technologies allowing vehicles to communicate with each other and the infrastructure are the way forward.

Smart roads are nothing new. Everyone knows dynamic overhead signage on freeways and arterial routes advising drivers of travel times, incidents, and hazards.

Some more modern infrastructure builds also allow a control centre to meter traffic onto onramps, making merging smoother, while lane allocations can be altered on the fly to deal with peak hour flows. The Sydney Harbour Bridge and its approaches are a great example of a smart road being able to shift lanes depending on the way the heaviest traffic flows.

However, those are smart roads version 1.0. The next generation of smart roads will come from is the development and implementation of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) technologies.

The tech is complementary – with V2I, a car or truck receives real-time information about the state of the road, incidents, congestion, and hazards from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors embedded in the road and its surrounds.

A truck climbing a blind hill, for example, could be warned of queuing over the crest, letting the driver slow down and potentially avoiding a collision.

With V2V, road users communicate wirelessly and seamlessly with one another, relaying data about the traffic and the state of the roads. Ultimately, this technology could be used in autonomous vehicles to establish ‘convoys’ moving down the highway, eliminating the driver as a risk factor and, in theory, increasing road safety and reducing the death toll.

The problem is that V2V and V2I are new technologies, and there are few standards governing their rollout. This creates a chicken-and-egg scenario – vehicle manufacturers won’t build the tech into their products until sufficient infrastructure smarts exist. But, road builders can’t create V2I without the fleets to use it.

The Australian Government’s $120 billion infrastructure investment is a good starting place for keeping the country moving, but technology will also play a future role in making roads and vehicles smarter, safer, and more efficient.