Congratulations to Shane Turner (Abley), Eddie Cook (KiwiRail) & Shaun Bosher (Stantec) on the great honour of being presented with a “Best Paper Award” at the 2020 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting.
Reducing speed limits to improve road safety are often opposed by people who blame crashes on poor driving ability rather than speed. They claim that well-trained drivers are infallible and can handle high speeds safely. But anyone can make a mistake while driving and due to the laws of physics and human body vulnerability, mistakes at high speed can result in vehicle occupants and other road users being killed or seriously injured. The design and operating speeds of our roads needs to be more forgiving of the mistakes we make.
Merry Christmas to you and your families, we hope you have safe and happy holidays ahead!
As the pace of innovation in road safety increases and the demand to quickly apply new safety treatments grows, there is no longer time to undertake traditional before-and-after assessment of crashes at trial sites, which can take years to produce results. Increasingly, researchers are looking at surrogate safety measures to understand how effective new road safety countermeasures are in addressing the risk of crashes, especially the more severe crashes, which are even more difficult to study using before-and-after studies.
Last month I was proud to gain my first Esri certification with the Esri Desktop Associate 19-001 certification. I had been considering taking the exam for some time, as I knew it would be great way to demonstrate my knowledge of the Esri platform. Fortunately Abley is really keen to support their employees in ongoing learning opportunities. They encouraged me to give it a go and allowed me time to study, so this gave me the boost to finally go ahead and accomplish it at my first attempt.
Earlier this year, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the User Experience (UX) New Zealand conference, hosted in Wellington. Given that my background is in Engineering, and more recently Software Development, it was quite different to any conference I have attended previously!
Straight out of the rowing boat and on to the hockey turf, Abley has made a successful comeback to hockey after taking a number of seasons off.
Employees and their families from across New Zealand came together on Saturday 30th November for the annual Abley Christmas function, organised by our Social Non-Club Committee.
Over the last ten years, there has been an upward trend in crashes involving pedestrian and cyclists at level (railway line) crossings in New Zealand. While safety at these crossings for motor vehicle users steadily improved over time, less attention was paid to the safety of pedestrians and cyclists at level crossings.
Have a read of our latest Street Smart newsletter, featuring road safety assessment tools, spatial analysis for transport networks, the Buller walking action plan, Network Operating Plans, Healthy Streets, meet our six new team members and more!
