The CITI Project: Building Australia’s first Cooperative Intelligent Transport System test facility for safety applications

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (CITS) increase the “time horizon”, the quality and reliability of information available to the drivers about their immediate environment, other vehicles and road users. This has the potential to greatly improve road safety, reduce greenhouse gases and improve network efficiency. The Cooperative Intelligent Transport System Initiative (CITI) pilot will be the first semi permanent CITS field test site in Australia. The Objective of the CITI project is to construct a 42 km connected freight corridor test facility in the Illawarra Region of NSW south of Sydney. This will be one of the first large scale test facility dedicated to Heavy Vehicles in the world. It is expected that road safety researchers across Australia as well as hardware and software developers from around the world will visit the Illawarra to test and evaluate the safety benefits of their systems. The project proposes to fit in-vehicle Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) transceivers into approximately 30 heavy vehicles that regularly travel the planned route. In future years the project is planned to install the technology into a further 120 trucks as well as passenger buses and light vehicles that regularly travel on the southern section of the route. The paper will outline the expected road safety benefits of CITS for Australia as well as provide details of the facilities being constructed in New South Wales and the opportunities that will be provided for Australasian road safety researchers.