The Australian Transport Research Cloud (ATRC) will provide transport researchers, planners, policy and decision makers from academia, government and industry with data and tools to accelerate transport research and impacts across Australia.

The ATRC seeks to enable world-leading transport research across Australia by providing high-value, integrated data and analytics, modelling, simulation and visualisation tools, which can also fuel planning, policy and decision making with data and information.

The problem

Currently, transport-oriented data in Australia is notoriously difficult to find, access and use. Further, use of these assets within tools may require significant wrangling and training to set up and obtain meaningful results. This can become particularly challenging when seeking to investigate problems at scale, such as large metropolitan cities or towns, that may require substantial cloud-based storage and/or compute resources.To address this, the ATRC will provide capabilities to support the needs of researchers focusing on passenger transport, specifically road and rail modes. It will also create opportunities for collaboration and the development of new tools, allowing resources to be brought together in a flexible and effective way that will ensure the project’s sustainability.

The benefits

Informed and impactful research will allow policy and planning decisions to be made based on how Australians use public and private transport options – as well as how they are likely to do so over a period of economic, environmental, technological and social change.For example, by making more efficient and effective evidence available to decision makers, the ATRC has the potential to reduce the costs of problems like road congestion. At a conservative estimate, if the ATRC supports a 1 per cent reduction in the addressable costs of congestion (estimated at 10 per cent of the costs and avoidable social costs of congestion), this would equate to reductions of $61.4 million per year by 2030.Benefits such as this have the potential to be realised across issues such as commute times, emissions levels and more, with opportunities including:

• Network analysis to reduce congestion and pollution, assess speed limits and improve trip times and connectivity;
• Building a better understanding of public transport accessibility, supply and demand across Australia;
• Live modelling of urban mobility and traffic flows, allowing for simulations using open-source tools – including the impact of autonomous and electric vehicles.