[@OKau] Meet the data owners: VicRoads (write-up)

[Steve Bennett]

Hi,

As an experiment, here's this week's blog post write up of Open Knowledge
Night in Melbourne. Feedback welcome on if this is useful or feels spammy.

http://au.okfn.org/2015/04/18/meet-the-data-owners-vicroads/

Steve

[image: Phil Reid, Steve Bennett (Open Knowledge), Evan Quick, Adrian
Porteous.] <http://au.okfn.org/files/2015/04/IMG_1455.jpg>

Phil Reid, Steve Bennett (Open Knowledge), Evan Quick, Adrian Porteous.
VicRoads is one of the most open-data-engaged Victorian
government departments and agencies. On Wednesday night, Adrian Porteous
<http://twitter.com/adrianporteous>, Evan Quick
<https://twitter.com/evan_quick> and Phil Reid came to fill us all in on
open data activities happening inside VicRoads – and to listen to what the
community is looking for next. Need some data? They’re all ears – try one
of them on Twitter, or maybe even Suggest a Dataset
<https://www.data.vic.gov.au/suggest_a_dataset>.
First, an overview. VicRoads has an enormous amount of data, broadly
divided into road infrastructure, traffic, crashes, registration and
licensing, and other spatial data (such as preferred heavy vehicle
routes). They have 20 datasets on data.vic.gov.au
<https://www.data.vic.gov.au/data/dataset?organization=vicroads>, and
another 20 spatial datasets on their ESRI open data portal
<http://vicroadsopendata.vicroadsmaps.opendata.arcgis.com/>. They also have
some useful applications which aren’t really open data, like CrashStats
<https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/safety-and-road-rules/safety-statistics/crash-statistics>
 and VicTraffic <http://traffic.vicroads.vic.gov.au/>.There’s some pretty
useful stuff there, like the speed zones and annual traffic volumes per
road segment.
But by their own admission, they have a long way to go. They have something
like 650 potential datasets, many of which could be very useful if made
open. For example, there are on average 5 bridge collisions per day across
the network. Releasing the location and height of every bridge could lead
to apps and maps to reduce that. They have the data, but it’s not perfect.
They have “weight in motion” data (are trucks overweight?) and lots of
others.
There were great questions from the audience, like where to go to find
information about trucks improperly using residential roads and how to
access realtime traffic light data (it’s hard but in progress).
[image: Great questions from the audience.]
<http://au.okfn.org/files/2015/04/IMG_1450.jpg>

Great questions from the audience.
Finally, a sneak preview of VicRoads street-level imagery on Mapillary
<http://www.mapillary.com/profile/vicroads>, which has just received final
approval for a mass import of imagery across the whole VicRoads network.
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