An anti-collision device trial designed to help trucks avoid accidents when they’re in convoy and trucking across New South Wales is due to start in June 2014.
The Cooperative Intelligent Transport Initiative (CITI) trial is being run by the NSW Centre for Road Safety. During the five-year trial, Adelaide-based connected vehicle technology provider Cohda Wireless will provide 95 MK4 anti-collision devices. Eighty-five of these are mobile units which will be fitted to trucks while the remaining 10 units will be placed along the highway.
Under the first phase of the trial, devices will be fitted to 30 trucks for use on a 42-kilometre route from Port Kembla to the Hume Highway-Picton Road interchange near Wilton, NSW.
The devices use a dedicated 5.9 GHz frequency to send information such as the truck’s position and speed, from the truck to roadside devices. The devices then send alerts, such as warnings about potential crashes, back to truck drivers.
In addition, the 10 roadside units will interface with traffic lights to transmit if they are green (go), orange (about to change) or red (stop) to drivers.
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NSW Centre for Road Safety's manager of road safety technology, John Wall, said that Cohda Wireless was chosen for the trial because it met the CITI Project’s technical specifications which are based on US Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) trials.
C-ITS is technology that allows vehicles and surrounding infrastructure to exchange information about the location, speed and direction of other road users that also use C-ITS.
”Our goal is to establish Australia's first long-term test area for C-ITS. The hard data we gather from vehicles up to 10 times per second as part of the project will assist us to measure the road safety benefits of this new technology,” Wall said in a statement.
According to Wall, 13 people died in crashes on the Port Kembla route during 2008-2011. Since then, the NSW government has upgraded the Hume highway, including a $237 million Holbrook bypass that opened in August 2013.
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