Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot Project Deployed in Queensland, Australia Assessed Self-Report Data based on Questionnaires, Interviews, and Focus Groups.
Ipswich
Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot Summary of the Subjective Evaluation Study Findings
Summary Information
The Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) technology allows vehicles to communicate with other vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and transport management systems in real-time, providing road users with information or visual warnings, on a dedicated Human Machine Interface (HMI). This study summarized the details from the Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot (ICVP), specifically the part which entailed a set of subjective self-report data based on four questionnaires with over 300 participants each, interviews with 53 responses, and focus groups with 47 participants, occurring over various data collection time points, involving six separate C-ITS technologies. The ICVP lasted from September 2020 to September 2021, with a total of 355 public participants in Ipswich, driving their own vehicles retrofitted with C-ITS technology, for a duration of nine months throughout the year-long pilot period. Of the 355 ICVP participants who completed the mandatory questionnaires, 100 (53 plus 47 previously mentioned) also participated in the optional interviews and focus group studies, providing qualitative findings.
METHODOLOGY
The participants were randomly assigned into either of two groups: Treatment Group that had an HMI receiving warnings, and Control Group that had an inactive HMI. Over nine months, both objective (driving) and subjective (self-reported) data were collected using a counterbalanced between-groups methodological design (i.e., baseline- or intervention- first conditions) with random allocation, regardless of the experimental group. Participants experienced safety information or warnings based on six different technologies presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Six C-ITS technologies tested in ICVP
FINDINGS
- The results showed a four to nine percentage point increase in technology usefulness rating, based on the grand (or pooled) mean of the four questionnaires across six different C-ITS technology uses cases, comparing treatment and control groups.
- Uniformly, over the four questionnaires, treatment participants rated IVS as the most useful technology.
- RWW-Speed technology use case revealed the highest improvement (nine percentage points), comparing the control and treatment groups’ grand means for the four questionnaires for this technology.
- Over 65 percent of participants indicated that none of the individual use cases should be removed, implying they could see benefit in all of them.
- Results from the interviews and focus group surveys produced qualitative findings only, but still, the results were in agreement with the ones obtained from the questionnaires; the IVS technology was perceived most positively.
- Interviews also revealed that the participants found C-ITS a beneficial idea in general but stated that further development and increased accuracy was needed to improve road safety.
