Track Day 2025

On Thursday 13th February, Compass held our annual Track Side Professional Developement Day at Driver Risk Management in Perth. Over 100 transport professionals from across Australian state government transport authorities and private sector spent the day participating in real-life road safety experiments and listening to presentations on how Compass Connected Vehicle data is being applied across Australia.

The event brought together innovative transport leaders from organisations such as Main Road Western Australia, The Department of State Growth Tasmania, University of Melbourne, GHD, Transport for New South Wales, The Road Safety Council, ITS Australia, Google, and Nearmap. Presenters included:

• Susan Harris, ITS Australia
• Lidiya Hudson, Department of State Growth Tasmania
• Leah Kaplan, Google Cloud
• Sam Mason, Nearmap
• Neema Nassir, University of Melbourne
• Fritha Argus, Main Roads Western Australia
• Scott Fennelly, Main Roads Western Australia
• Katie Hodson-Thomas from Road Safety Council and James Pennings from Altus Group

Key Learnings From The Road Safety Experiments

Attendees participated in 6 experiments that imitated sections of the road network under different speeding and braking conditions:

1. Simulated queues at a set of traffic lights
2. A roundabout
3. A slow point
4. Swerving
5. Lane change
6. Harsh braking

Participants received personalised results via their phone for their overall trip results and the results of each individual experiment. An example of the kinds of data they received is below.

Speed and G-force Distributions per site

Below is the speed and g-force distribution graphs for each experiment site in km/h. The highest speeds and g-forces were recorded at the Braking and Intersection experiments.

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Driver Self-Reporting

77% of drivers overestimated the intensity of their g-forces. We hypothesise that part of this is an education gap about what is considered a safe or unsafe g-force reading (i.e., above 0.47 or below -0.47) and contextualising g-force movements in real-life scenarios. The estimates improved for drivers that did more than one round of experiments. Most drivers complied with safe speed limits with 71.3% driving under the speed limits.

Below is a breakdown of under and over estimations of speed and g-force at each experiment site. The biggest underestimations of g-forces occurred at the braking experiment; 26.6% of users estimated their g-force was lower than the actual reading.

The most overspeeding occurred at the braking experiment. Overspeeding at the braking experiment could be attributed to the experiment design - drivers were asked to accelerate towards a certain point on the track and then brake harshly on command.

Distance from Stopping Line

The above images show the intersection experiment. The traffic light for this experiment was located at the entry point of the intersection. The coloured dots indicate how far the queue was from the stop line.

Ross Across Visualisation

We drove a Jeep from Sydney to Perth and collected the data to see what happened. The data - including odometer, fuel level, and location - from the +3,000km journey was visualised during Track Day as part of Native Connect.