| Project Background
The Transport Analysis Unit within the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) is responsible for governance of State’s strategic transport models.
Generally, these models are updated in line with the ABS Census collection and with the next Census in 2021, collection of traffic data this year would provide consistency to support various model developments and updates.
In order to update, calibrate and validate models, traffic counts are a critical input. Screenlines are used in transport models to validate movements of traffic across physical or artificial lines, broad sectors and along major corridors. These screenlines are made up of a number of crossing points, each requiring a traffic count in order to validate the models. It is critical that traffic counts are accurate and consistent with each other, and therefore it is desirable if counts are collected at the same time. Some exceptions are acceptable as long as the majority of screenlines points are collected at the same time.
There are around 482 locations in the SEQ region requiring traffic counts to enable validation of the existing South East Queensland Strategic Transport Model (SEQSTM-MM) as well as the Brisbane Strategic Transport Model (BSTM-MM).
It is very important that this program proceeds in 2021 as the ABS Census is collected in August 2021, and the transport models will be built and updated using this population and employment data - therefore the counts need to be collected close to Census time.
This data collection project will improve the reliability of the transport models in South East Queensland (SEQ) as they will be validated against a consistent and complete dataset collected at a similar time as socio-economic data from which the model relationships are built.
The SEQ transport models are critical to the planning of the transport network. These models are used in almost every network, corridor and area transport planning project undertaken by TMR for SEQ. It is important that these models are kept up to date with current data, particularly with the changing network environment in SEQ with the introduction of new road infrastructure and public transport infrastructure projects since the last traffic count program. The models need to be able to respond to the effects that these new network inclusions have on travel demand.
There are a number of strategic transport demand models developed within SEQ. For this project the focus will be on the study area of the BSTM-MM and SEQSTM-MM models as these models are owned, developed and maintained by TMR. Most of the traffic data for these models is outdated (2016) and needs to be updated.
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