 Traffic engineering services for a proposed car sales & repair centre in Hammond Road, Dandenong, Victoria.
Client: SMART Town Planning Pty Ltd Location: Dandenong, Victoria Project Stage: Planning Permit RedSquare Traffic was recently engaged by Smart Town Planning to prepare a Traffic Impact Assessment (TIA) as well as a Car Parking Demand Assessment for a proposed car sales & repair centre in Dandenong. RedSquare Traffic’s team commenced the project by undertaking parking surveys together with an on-site road safety assessment. Following the design guidelines specified in Austroads Design Guidelines, our team conducted a comprehensive road safety assessment including an assessment of the suitability of its existing access points located in close proximity of a major intersection i.e. Hammond Road & Cheltenham Road. We prepared a car parking demand assessment to support a car parking reduction of 16 parking spaces. Later on, a traffic generation and distribution assessment as well as a turn warrants assessment were prepared. A realistic list of recommendations were provided to the client covering all required bases including recommendations to modify exiting access points. At RedSquare Traffic, we don't prepare half baked cakes for our clients. We believe compromising the quality by using short-cuts only end up causing headaches in the long run for both the clients and us. A quick turnaround can be attractive. However, it can never beat quality piece of work.
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 Traffic engineering terms are all too similar for a traffic engineering amateur to know the differences. Traffic management plan, traffic impact assessment, parking assessment and parking management plan... all sounds too similar, don't they? If so, what is a Car Parking Management Plan and when is one required?
In the simplest terms, a Car Parking Management Plan devices the strategies and engineering solutions of managing a car park. But what are these strategies? This is often something we take for granted, until there isn't a strategy. Then we start complaining with statements like "who designed this car park?", "why is there a dead end?", "why is it so dark in here?", "why can't I turn my car around?". Car Parking Management Plans are required under several different scenarios. One of the most common scenarios is when you have a basement car park providing several car parking spaces. These are also required for shopping centre car parks or any car park design that requires traffic management features to control the flow of traffic and pedestrians. Some of these traffic management treatments are signage, linemarking, lighting, parking bays etc. A Car Parking Management Plan typically reviews and presents background documentation including Planning Scheme Clauses and information about the project. Following on, it provides a discussion piece about car parking accessibility and allocation, which presents detailed information about how many spaces are allocated to which part of the development and how these are accessed. For some developments, there is also a section on bicycle parking provisions. Pedestrian accessibility is a key consideration of a car parking management plan, where DDA compliance and pedestrian connectivity are reviewed in detail and provided with engineering solutions where necessary. RedSquare Traffic further provides a section on security, lighting and access which are essentials of a successful car park design. Access considerations are provided with traffic engineering treatments that ensure each car or person that enters the car park is faced with a logical operational arrangement of the car park that permits easy and safe manoeuvres. There is also a substantial focus on signage and linemarking treatments that are the core of a car parking management plan. RedSquare Traffic provides technical advice on directional, wayfinding, parking allocation and time limit signage as well as signage to manage access and egress points. Further, advice regarding linemarking treatments are included in the form of pavement arrows, linemarking of standard and DDA car parking bays. Lastly, waste and loading management treatments are taken into considerations where linemarking, signage and access design treatments are provided for waste and loading activities. All of above is compiled into a formal report inclusive of traffic engineering drawings that indicate signage, linemarking and traffic management features to form a comprehensive Car Parking Management Plan (CPMP). Talk to RedSquare Traffic to learn more on 0370366734. Relevant items: Traffic Impact Assessments, Traffic and Parking Assessments, Car Park Designs, Parking Demand Assessments.  Consulting a traffic engineer during a feasibility stage assessment may not be the first thought that comes to your mind. Traffic engineering services such as Traffic Impact Assessments, Parking Demand Assessments, Traffic Management Plans or Road Safety Audits are commonly sought in detailed design or planning stages of a project. Traffic engineers are not typically consulted until something goes wrong or until some document specifies that a traffic engineer must be hired. However, RedSquare Traffic believes this mindset is not always right.
Traffic engineers can add value in very early stages of a project by:
Leave transport to us, you handle the rest. There is enough burden in other areas. RedSquare Traffic Creativity in Transport Engineering  If your land is located within the Principle Public Transport Network (PPTN) area boundaries of your Local Government Area, a reduced car parking requirement applies to your development site. This is specified under Clause 52.06 of the Planning Scheme. In certain development types such as restaurants, this can be a significant reduction of the required number of parking spaces. For the development to qualify under this scheme, it must fall within the PPTN area and your land must fully or partially fall within 400m of public transport access on the PPTN. Reduced parking provisions also promotes the use of active and public transport modes. It's always best to get these requirements checked before you rule out your development.
- RedSquare Traffic Creativity in Transport Engineering DOES NOT HAVING ENOUGH SPACE FOR CUSTOMER PARKING PUT YOU OFF FROM STARTING YOUR DEVELOPMENT?12/10/2021  If the answer to the above question is 'YES', you have made a mistake. Here is an example. We recently prepared a parking demand assessment for a restaurant that can serves for 150+ customers in indoor and outdoor seating areas. Guess how many car parking spaces it provides? Five. Yes, just five. Statutory parking rates of Clause 52.06 of the Planning Scheme states that a rate of 0.4 car parking spaces per customer applies to restaurants. At that rate, this restaurant would have ideally required 60 car parking spaces. A little math here, an average car parking space is 2.6m x 4.9m, which equates to 12.74 square meters. The land area required for just the 60 parking spaces would be 764.40 square meters. Then you add the parking aisle widths, pedestrian paths etc. You would need to purchase another 1000 square meter land just to fit car parking spaces in them. This is far from reality, isn't it? Local council do not require you to follow the statutory requirements precisely. As long as a car parking demand assessment is provided with accurate information, a parking requirement reduction is allowed. In fact, councils support drifting away from car parking as long as you have a solid plan. A solid plan typically includes the following:
If you think about it, providing the exact requirement is in fact supporting the use of motor cars in place of other sustainable transport modes. This is where traffic engineers can help. We help determine these transport related opportunities and assist you through the process of getting your development plan approved. RedSquare Traffic's traffic engineers prepare Car Parking Demand Assessments, Traffic Impact Assessments, Traffic and Parking Assessments which are required under the Planning scheme to support reductions of car parking spaces. Talk to us today to learn more about parking space reductions or car parking demand assessments. - RedSquare Traffic Creativity in transport engineering
RedSquare Traffic was recently engaged by Inception Planning to prepare a Traffic Impact Assessment to support a patronage increase in a proposed function centre located in an unsealed, single lane, bi-directional narrow road without any street lighting which also has a narrow culvert bridge!
RedSquare Traffic’s team commenced the project by undertaking turning movement and parking surveys together with an on-site road safety assessment. Following the design guidelines specified in ARRB’s Best Practice Guide for Unsealed Roads and Austroads Design Guidelines, our team conducted a comprehensive road safety assessment including an assessment of the suitability of its existing unsealed access road and the non-perpendicular driveway. We performed several design guideline checks including an assessment of road carriageway width, lighting levels, drainage and several sight distance calculations including:
Additionally we performed a parking demand assessment, a traffic generation and distribution assessment as well as a turn warrants assessments. A realistic list of recommendations were provided to the client covering all required bases. At RedSquare Traffic, we don't prepare half baked cakes for our clients. We believe compromising the quality by using short-cuts only end up causing headaches in the long run for both the clients and us. A quick turnaround can be attractive. However, it can never beat a quality piece of work. - RedSquare Traffic Creativity in Transport Engineering  Rural roads or local roads with very few amounts of traffic aren't always provided with street lighting. At night, driving on these narrow roads can be risky. Although you may lodge numerous requests with your Council, they may not prioritise your road ahead of other major roads in the area and install street lighting. For subdivisions and unilluminated internal roads within a private property, it may be extremely costly to install light poles.
In a situation like this, these guideposts can be a simple and effective treatment that can be used on roads to increase visibility, especially at night. The red and white markers on these guideposts glow in the dark and indicate the edges of the road. Especially in rural settings like what is shown in the photo, these can be vital in preventing vehicles from driving off the road carriageway. In narrow points like culverts, guideposts are recommended both on the approach and departure ends. According to road design guidelines, in Australia, guideposts with red markers must be installed on the left side of the road and ones with white markers must be placed on the right side of the road. These simple cost-effective local area traffic management (LATM) treatments go unnoticed in the midst of fancy street light poles, rumble strips, RRPMs and road safety barriers. Talk to traffic engineers of RedSquare Traffic to learn more about guideposts and other traffic engineering treatments. Follow our blog for more articles like. Relevant Links:  RedSquare Traffic's team performing a turning movement survey at the above intersection saw a near miss crash that could have resulted in a fatality or a serious injury. A car approaching from northwest having successfully avoided a potential rear-end crash at Outlet Road, had to avoid another conflict at the gravel road further southeast (Coghlans Road). We couldn't help but notice the below par spacing of the two intersections (Outlet Road and Coghlans Road), which is currently at 109.7m, where it should ideally be 275m in a rural 100km/h zone. The 275m space is known as the functional area of an intersection. It goes without saying, the geometry of the other legs of this intersection only makes this intersection a complex one, in a rural context.
Austroads Guide to Road Design Part 4 defines this situation as "Stopping distance is a method of assessing the required downstream distance. This allows a driver to pass through the intersection before having to decide that it is necessary to stop because of a conflict at a downstream access connection". It is true, in a rural context it may not always be necessary to provide the distances specified on the standards and regulations especially due to low turning traffic volumes. However, it is always in a scenario like this that crashes are likely to happen as drivers have low expectations of turning vehicles. Lack of street lighting only make it worse. A common traffic engineering solution is to provide a basic auxiliary right turn (BAR) treatment or to provide a widened shoulder to allow for a vehicle to get around a stopped/stopping vehicle without causing a rear-end crash. This also increases space available for an emergency manoeuvre to avoid unexpected conflicts at an intersection. Keep your eyes on the road. It only takes a millisecond for something terrible to happen. Follow RedSquare Traffic's blog to read more articles like this. Talk to us for all your traffic engineering and road safety engineering needs. RedSquare Traffic  Source: Google Maps Have you ever driven through a roundabout and realised at the last minute that you cannot see the oncoming vehicle due to vegetation on the central island? This is a significant safety risk that should not be ignored. Next time you see it, make a complaint about it.
Austroads Design Guidelines explicitly specify that vegetation on the central island must not prevent an approaching driver from seeing oncoming vehicles. It specifies a sight distance triangle which should not be visually obstructed by any means. As such it is always an issue that can be easily rectified. Consequences of not rectifying this easy issue is far greater. All vegetation on central islands must not be a type that grows above drivers’ eye levels measured from a passenger car. Road authorities must also ensure vegetation is regularly maintained to prevent this issue from occurring. Aside from this, there must treatments in place to reduce approaching speeds of vehicles at roundabouts. These include reverse curves, rumble strips, street signage, flashing signs etc.  Psychology is defined by the Australian Psychological Society as "...both a science and a profession, devoted to understanding how people think, feel, behave and learn..."
Right then, if psychology is how people think, feel, behave and learn.. there is definitely some common ground between transport engineering and human psychology. Let's explore that. Here is an example involving thinking, feeling, behaving and learning coming all together at once in the world of transport engineering. You are on the bus coming home after work on a freezing cold rainy evening. The bus will eventually stop 1.5km away from your home. You have no option, but to walk. You are thinking, what to do - should I walk or should I call my partner. Then your partner is busy and they are stuck at some other task and cannot come to pick you up. You have no choice, but to walk that 1.5km in this cold, rainy night. Now, you hop off the bus, walk on this footpath that is full of water puddles. You are feeling irritated, frustrated and regretful for not taking the car to work on this rainy day. Now you go home, dwell on your frustration and check the weather forecast for tomorrow. Its going to rain even more for the next three days. Next day you wake up thinking there is no way I am taking the bus today, I am driving to work. Your behaviour today was directly or indirectly affected by the poor user experience from yesterday's incident - (1) the 1.5km distance from bus stop to home and (2) the water puddles on the footpath. Through this, you have learned to check the weather forecast before you make decisions about the mode of transport you opt for. This is just one simple example of how human psychology affects decisions made in relation to the world of transport. Now, the important question is do engineering standards discuss human psychology? Do we consider the differences in thinking patterns born out of cultural differences, weather patterns, medical conditions or the state of mind (anger, depression, sadness) when determining transport engineering solutions. Here are some hypothetical situations we haven't possibly addressed solutions for:
We as engineers, planners and architects must not eliminate human factors from our decision making processes. A sight distance calculation complying with the recommended minimum sight distance criterion does not necessarily provide a good enough solution. A parking demand assessment justifying a reduction of parking spaces by providing bicycle hoops does not necessarily mean users will choose to ride bikes. A local area traffic management strategy suggesting a lowered speed limit or a 10km/h shared zone does not necessarily reduce the speed at which vehicles would travel. We have a responsibility to ask, whether a certain solution would work in each individual scenario. It's not just about getting the approval from the council or the road authority. Spend 5 minutes stepping into the shoes of the end-user. Let's start with that. RedSquare Traffic Consultants Creativity in Transport Engineering |
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