Using the demonstration

You can view the Truck Rollover Risk Map demonstration here.

Zoom the map using the +/- control or your mouse wheel. The map displays heavy vehicle related crashes as points and the curvature level of the roads as a colored line. Left clicking on the map will place markers on the closest crash event and curve section. You can then click on the markers to see more information. Right click clears the markers.

The control on the top right allows for changing the background map tiles and toggling the data layers on and off.

About the project

A truck rollover can be extremely dangerous. Truck rollover crashes often result in death or serious injuries to the truck driver. In Australia, approximately 500 heavy truck occupants are hospitalised from road crashes each year. Of these, approximately 30 per cent are categorised with high-threat-to-life injuries (BITRE, 2020). 2019 data showed there was a marked increase in the number of incidents where truck drivers lost their lives. The number of drivers who died in major incidents involving an NTI insured truck was over 2.5 times higher in 2019 than in 2017 (NTI, 2020).

This project focused on tackling this issue by providing road map data to help identify high risk locations for heavy vehicles. The work was undertaken by the Australian Ressearch Board (ARRB now NTRO) under the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator's (NHVR) Heavy Vehicle Safety Initiative (HVSI) supported by the Australian Government.

The work investigated available data OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and assessed its coverage and suitability for use on the National Key Freight Routes (KFR’s). Heavy Vehicle (HV) related crash locations were identified by analysing crash data from crash records. The data was further refined to identify potential roll-over and run-off road HV incidents. While the identification relies on accurate and consistent crash coding, the resulting dataset provides a good indicator of potential HV rollover locations on the KFR’s. As part of the project, Seceda also undertook additional work to assess the feasibility of identifying road curvature from OSM data. A method was developed to generate and categorise road curvature for the KFR’s and can be used to identify roads or routes of high curvature, as well as specific sharp corners and bends.

The project milestone was completed February 2013. A subset of the project outputs (crashes and curvature) are demonstrated via a map in this website for information purposes.

The project data was updated in March 2024 to include the latest available crash data involving heaving vehicles from NTRO's national crashes database.

Data & license

This website is a proof on concept demonstration. You are free to use this website for your own personal use, but the website, it's contents, associated maps and data cannot be used for any decision making, planning, policy or commercial purpose. The authors make no representations that the website or underlying data is complete or accurate and acknowledge that data and analysis is likely to contain ommisions and errors.

The project utilised OpenStreetMap data in parts. OpenStreetMap® is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF). More on the license can be found at the license page.

The crash data used for the project was sourced and provided by ARRB (now NTRO). It cannot be extracted, copied or reproduced in any way.

The curvature data was adapted from a method published by Adam Franco (2012) on github.

The map tiles are provided by mapbox.

Contact for more information

For futher information about the project please contact NTRO.