Building a Road Closure Template for Victoria

The Victorian Department of Transport and Planning wanted to understand the effect of major road closures. Specifically, they wanted to understand where likely pressure points would be on the network as a result of closures and better analyse and plan future closures while minimising disruption to traffic. 

Previously, information about road closures was collected via Bluetooth sniffers. However, it's not viable to install these devices at every intersection. Connected vehicle data provides an alternative solution to monitor before, during, and after a road closure without installing additional hardware.

To understand driver behaviour and potential impacts on traffic, a dashboard was created. It covered all trips traversing the northbound segment of St Kilda Road (between Carlisle Rd and Alma Rd) and that start in the AM Peak hours between 7 am and 10 am. It outlined the Origin and Destination SA2s, the number of trips, and the percentage of trips between different SA2s.  

Below is a map of ending SA2s. The darker the colour, the more trips ended within that boundary area. 

Using this information, the operations team could see which routes may be impacted the most once the segment of St Kilda Road is closed off. The dashboard also helped them understand where these trips start from and end up in terms of SA2 and road level.

The result of this project was a Road Closure Template that will be used to analyse and plan road closures across the state of Victoria.