TRIAL EVALUATION OF WIDE, TACTILE, CENTRE LINE CONFIGURATIONS ON THE NEWELL HIGHWAY

Studies into crashes on high speed, rural roads have shown that the installation of a wide tactile centreline may be effective in reducing ‘head on’ (not overtaking) and ‘run off road to the right’ crashes. These two crash types on high speed rural highways are often related to driver fatigue or driver distraction and regularly have severe outcomes.

However, there is currently no Australian Standard wide centreline configuration that allows a vehicle to legally cross over the centre line from either direction while overtaking.

The purpose of this project is to evaluate a number of new, audio tactile, wide centreline configurations, trialled by the RTA, on the Newell Highway in Western NSW. These line-marking configurations cater for all overtaking manoeuvres, where appropriate, but also restrict overtaking where it is unsafe to do so.

This paper will present a comparison of driver behaviour towards current line marking methods against the new, wider line marking configurations used in the trial.

These new wide centreline configurations are expected to have a beneficial effect on reducing crashes caused by fatigue and driver inattention on undivided rural carriageways.