Conference name: Highways AU - "roads for a connected future".
This page includes SCATS (traffic signal software) related extracts from this panel discussion at 12:40 October 15th 2025 (2025-10-15). Transcript verified by a human. Newlines are arbitrary as is punctuation.
Conference Agenda and other panellists: https://www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/highways-au/agenda.stm
This discussion was at a public, freely accessible conference, and includes (currently) unpublished safety-critical information - it was stated there was a "34% decrease in risky crossing behaviour" at a Manly intersection due to traffic signal timing changes to prioritise pedestrians. This information is in the public interest - as of 2025-10-15 pedestrian fatalities are up 39% year on year in NSW, Australia (2025 prelim. vs 2024 prelim. 12-month period ending 14 October)
(introduction)
Ian Christensen, Managing Director, iMOVE CRC
...So Roy, how are we going to make our roads smarter and what's it going to give us?Roy Brown, SCATS Director Technology and Product, Transport for NSW
Thanks for that Ian, I appreciate it.So, SCATS for those who don't know what we do, we're a department of Transport for New South Wales owned software development company. We develop and maintain the software and the solutions that run the signals, the traffic signals across New South Wales. Not only New South Wales, but also 216 customers globally. So we're one of those transport stories from New South Wales that the government invested in long, long ago and has been adopted worldwide as a - well not exactly a standard - but it's certainly the largest adaptive traffic management system in the world. So what that gives us is both a very local perspective in terms of interacting with Transport for NSW as our most beloved and number one customer, but also transport agencies across the globe, so we get to hear a lot about what roads networks need, what people need for innovation, for advancement in technology in the area of optimising traffic networks, optimising safety outcomes, and optimising modes of transport.
So, from our perspective, there's a lot that we can do in terms of making the infrastructure smarter and getting more information out of the traffic network so that we can optimise traffic patterns even better.
So, as an example at the moment, we are working on smarter technology to enable detection of the number of pedestrians waiting to cross the roads. So we've got a trial up live in Manly at the moment. The very intelligent people who are responsible for that are with us in the audience, so thank you (unintelligible).
That innovation in itself integrates with our adaptive system and lengthens the walk time that's provided, depending on the number of people waiting. So in terms of safety outcomes, we've already seen that that's made a 34% decrease in risky crossing behaviour.
So this is at Manly, just when the ferries come in, you suddenly get a big surge of people waiting. There might be 1500 people waiting to cross the road. And you know what happens then.
On a standard walk time, people don't get time to cross. People at the end, end up running across, people hesitate, it's kind of tricky and dangerous. This technology adapts that walking time and gives longer times to cross when there's a big crowd of people. But it adapts back; if there's nobody waiting, it goes back to a normal walk time, which then allows the vehicular traffic to go through. So that's just one of our first examples of getting smarter technology into the infrastructure to enable the whole system to work better.
There is so much technology around these days. The big challenge for us is how to make sure that we've got a standardisation of the interfaces, to be honest - sorry if I'm getting technical - but the best way to scale this technology out and make smarter infrastructure so it can contribute to smarter roads and better outcomes is to actually work on that side of it from our perspective, get software that is scalable and extensible and applicable for the modern and evolving needs of transport customers
Ian Christensen
Okay, so we think if we can count better, count people, count cars then we can actually guide the network to service those people and those demands more accurately than (Roy: ...absolutely...) the kind of standard cycle time they might have been provided with in the past.Roy Brown
Yeah, and just quickly there, you'd also - more information, more data will enable our customers, so the roads authorities, to make smarter decisions for what they want to do with their own place making. So setting up policy templates that reflect priority around active transport, for example, is an immediate correlation of that technology. If we know what the traffic patterns are, if we know what the demand is, and we know what the policy settings need to be to prioritise different things, we're able to actually then provide a much safer experience and optimise the infrastructure, which, as you might be aware, is rather expensive.So building more infrastructure, hard, optimising it, better option.
Ian Christensen ...
...
Ian Christensen
That sounds quite exciting, it feels like we're building an information ecosystem for all the participants in the transport world that they can share information and make use of information that is presented by (inaudible), for example, the Department of Main Roads.So I'm going to sort of extend from that question to Roy. Roy, you already operate a system that ingests a lot of data and helps make decisions about road usage. So, SCATS is an interesting vehicle. Is it a commercial operation or is it part of the state government transport management process? How is SCATS going to lead us to a smarter road network?
Roy Brown
I feel like maybe it would look like I teed you up for that question Ian, because are we a commercial entity or are we part of Transport for NSW?The answer is yes. (laughter) We're both. Outside of NSW we sell the SCATS software and services to other roads authorities. Inside NSW, as I said, customer number one, our most beloved people in NSW. So we don't make any revenue from New South Wales, we're just a part of the infrastructure provider there.
Our view on where to take some of the information that is generated and then put out by the SCATS system has got two dimensions to it, 'cause I think Simona, you're exactly right, and same Amit, the amount of data that we have at our fingertips just from SCATS - so that's not including other mobility providers, that's not including any of the additional sensors or any of that stuff - the stuff that we have right now is huge.
So we take a snapshot of every intersection, every second of every day. We store that information, we know exactly what's happening. We've got the receipts.
So making that more easily available is one of our areas of development. So city councils, as some members of the audience would know, are trying to get information about traffic patterns from individual intersections is quite a palaver at the moment. One of the reasons is that we just haven't set up the technology within New South Wales to do it properly. So that's a challenge that we're rising to as well.
So we provide information internally to make decision making faster and quicker for traffic control operators. We've got products that make that data available for traffic planning, so longer term stuff, not real time operations. We also have a product that provides the signal phase and timing of each individual intersection and broadcasts it. The question at the moment is, broadcasts it to whom and via what?
So that answer's not quite there for the industry at this point in time. But one of the things that we absolutely agree with Amit on is that we need a standardised way to centralise information about what's happening on the roads and make it available to people using the roads. There's a, I guess a data broker model is something that we would absolutely support. And in that model, people with, let's say, SIM cards in cars would be able to actually subscribe to that information set and have information pushed to them. Now whether that's through a map provider within the car, whether it's a separate map provider, whether it's provided by BMW, Lexus, whoever is a service, I'm kind of agnostic about that. What I want to do is make sure that our signal phase and timing information is available for people who want to use it.
Trucking companies have approached us quite a bit, saying, Hey, how can we get that? If we know in advance what's happening with the signals, we can save a lot of money on our freight. We can save on braking, we can save on fuel, we can save on times. So we know that there's a real use for the information that we've got. We've taken some steps in terms of actually exposing it and making it available. The next steps are yet to come and I think one of the key things is as an industry, finding a standardised way to do that and as regulatory bodies within Australia figuring out the right way to make that available to people, companies, organisations that want to subscribe to that information. I think that's where we're headed in terms of making that information available and surfacing out the data that we provide.
Ian Christensen
......
Ian Christensen
So, we've just got a few minutes left, so I want to give you a chance to ask your questions or make your observations and challenge the panellists about their view of where technology is going to help us make smarter roads and smarter decisions.So now it's your turn. Any questions?
Unknown speaker So we'll just get you to say who you are and where you're from and just who your question is directed to please.
(unintelligible speaker name)
Thank you to the panel. I'm (inaudible) from the University of New South Wales. My question is to Roy about embedding SCATS data to maps. So I recently travelled to China and I saw that (inaudible) map has embedded traffic signal status and also even the countdown. And I've tried actually robo-taxies there, and I could see that actually the robo-taxies also are using those, as well as ordinary drivers. And I was just basically thinking, why not embedding it in Google Map in Australia? Do you have any plan for such thing? You touched on this, but then I'm asking particularly for embedding in Google Map or Apple Map.Roy Brown
Yes. (laughter) Thank you for the question. It's interesting that you saw that in China because in fact China is our largest installation base for SCATS. We started selling to them in 1988, I think it was Laurie Brereton, the Minister for Roads at the time. So we've been doing business with Chinese cities for a long time. The ability to provide that signal phasing timing information out to map providers and to mobility providers is exactly what I was talking about before.So we've got the way to do it now, the business model and how to do it is a different question.
If you ask Google, they're very happy to just take it all - not so happy to pay for it. So this is where I've got the two hats on, the Transport for New South Wales and the commercial side of things. Transport for New South Wales can't subsidise other people's commercial gain more than they have in the past.
So yes, we are absolutely looking at that. We're looking at how to do that in the best way, in the safest way of course, because adaptive traffic signals change the timing, and looking at the best way to get that information safely out to the ecosystem and what the commercial models look like.
Just quickly going back to Ian's question, I think it absolutely makes sense that there's one source of data, but I think there are commercial imperatives that might make, that might be faster. I don't want to cast any aspersions on the speed with which traffic authorities move. (laughter)
Ian Christensen
Okay, alright, so we have time for one more. ...
Response to my public Q&A question at the public "SCATS – What is it and where is it heading" talk on 2025-02-06:
Question: Jake Coppinger, day job at Atlassian, volunteer with Better Streets, but representing myself here. A question on open data and cycle times: My understanding is from mid-March, WA Main Roads will be able to release monthly dumps of their cycle times that were the real-time cycle time data. Do these upgrades enable that feature in New South Wales, or would we be able to release open data here? Thanks.
Answer (Director Network Operations, Transport for NSW): Essentially, the New South Wales government hasn’t determined whether or not we will release information completely on an AI platform on cycle time data.
We will do it at a user pay cost just because that open platform, I think, because that open platform hasn’t been developed yet. So, you know, we will provide that data. The way in which we present it at the moment, again, is very labour intensive, so, we charge for that data. Do we have any real objection to providing that data as operators, to providing that data openly? No, I don’t think so. But exactly what the government and transport at a senior executive level wants to do, obviously that hasn’t been determined yet.
For crowdsourced data see Better Intersections, for GIPA'd 2018 data see Green Lights More Often: The Secret 2018 Study of Sydney’s Traffic Signals