Johann Tay – Founding Principal, TVL

Multidisciplinary Road Traffic Expert. Engineer, Investigator, Court Witness, Researcher.

Johann Tay is one of a small number of practitioners in Australia with authoritative, degree-qualified expertise across all three primary elements of the road transport system — the road infrastructure, the vehicle, and the driver — combined with the human factors knowledge and legal literacy to apply that expertise in court and policy settings.

He founded Traffic Vehicles & Logistics Pty Ltd in 2013 on the premise that the road transport system is best understood as a whole, and that the most consequential insights come from examining how its elements interact — not from treating them in isolation.

Over 25 years, he has worked across research, government, public policy, fleet operations, and consulting — building on an early career in technology that gives his engineering practice a depth of digital literacy uncommon in the road safety field. He has appeared as a court-appointed Expert Witness in criminal and civil proceedings, conducted road safety audits across Victoria and nationally, led technology and innovation programs for a major public transport operator, and presented research at the Australasian Road Safety Conference in consecutive years.

Academic

The University of Melbourne

  • Bachelor of Engineering with Honours — Mechanical Engineering
  • Bachelor of Commerce — Marketing and Management

Monash University

  • Master of Traffic Engineering
  • Master of Transport — specialising in Transport Planning, Economics and Managing Innovation
  • Monash Business School Prize for Excellence in Managing Innovation, 2017
  • Honour Roll, Monash University, 2004

Professional

  • Senior Road Safety Auditor — Victorian accreditation, held continuously since 2010
  • Remote Pilot Licence (CASA RePL) — aerial photogrammetry and scene documentation
  • Heavy Rigid Driver Licence — commercial vehicle assessment
  • Motorcycle Licence — powered two-wheeler matters
  • Motorsport Australia Official — crash dynamics in competitive motorsport environments

Career Narrative

Johann’s grounding in technology predates his engineering career. Through his undergraduate years and into the early 2000s, he worked in IT support and helpdesk roles across the education and SME sectors — maintaining networks, troubleshooting hardware and software, and developing database systems. This was not incidental to his later career. It established a fluency with computer systems — their architecture, their capabilities, and their failure modes — that has distinguished his practice ever since, and that became increasingly valuable as vehicle technology grew in complexity.

His formal road transport career began in research — contributing to Austroads projects at the Australian Road Research Board on microsimulation modelling, freeway management, and road safety engineering risk assessment. That foundation in evidence-based practice has shaped everything since.

From there, his career moved across the road transport system in a way that few practitioners’ careers do. At VicRoads he worked on network operations and incident management on the Western Ring Road and Craigieburn Bypass. At the City of Greater Geelong and later the City of Whitehorse, he managed traffic and road safety engineering programs, investigated local fatal crashes, and liaised with VicRoads, Victoria Police, and the Department of Justice. At RACV, he took the technical lead on roads and traffic public policy, represented members on government committees and working groups, and wrote a monthly Road Rules column for RoyalAuto magazine — building a public communication discipline that informs his expert witness practice today.

From 2014 to 2020, Johann served as Manager Telematics & Road Safety and subsequently Head of ICT and Innovation at CDC Victoria (ComfortDelGro), one of Australia’s largest bus operators. He led a team across communications infrastructure, business systems, and technology deployment — including the rollout of Mobileye ADAS across a 700-vehicle bus fleet, the design and integration of the Victorian Operations Control Centre, and the specification of technology infrastructure for a $15 million depot facility. This operational immersion in fleet technology at scale directly informs TVL’s vehicle technology and fleet safety practice.

Since founding TVL in 2013, Johann has built a practice that spans forensic crash investigation, road safety engineering, fleet safety consulting, and research. Court expert witness appointments have been a growing focus of the practice since 2024.

Presentations

  • 2025 — Australasian Road Safety Conference, Perth: Case studies from fatal crash investigations by Court-appointed Expert Witness
  • 2024 — Australasian Road Safety Conference, Hobart: Retrofit Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (R-ADAS) in Australia
  • 2024 — ITS Australia Summit, Sydney: Retrofit ADAS in Australia
  • 2006 — Australian Road Research Board Conference, Canberra: Microsimulation as a planning, operations and training aid for incident management

Publications

  • 2010 — Austroads: Road Safety Engineering Risk Assessment Part 2: Crash Risk Migration
  • 2007 — Austroads: Microsimulation as a planning, operations and training aid for incident management
  • 2006 — Austroads: The use and application of microsimulation traffic models
  • 2006 — Austroads/VicRoads: Performance standards for skid resistance of pavement markings
  • 2005 — ARRB: Arterial travel times for Springvale Road and Hoddle/Nepean Highway

Professional Affiliations

  • Society of Automotive Engineers Australasia (SAE-A) — Board of Directors, 2024–present
  • National Road Safety Partnership Programme (NRSPP) — Steering Committee Member, 2025–present
  • Engineers Australia — Member, 2024–present
  • Australasian College of Road Safety (ACRS) — Member, Victorian Chapter, Local Government Network, Road Policing Network, Heavy Vehicle Safety Network, Rural Road Safety Network
  • ITS Australia — Member, 2015–present
  • Transport Professionals Association (TPA, formerly AITPM) — Member, 2010–present

Working On A Matter That Requires Johann’s Expertise?

Johann accepts briefs directly from solicitors, barristers, and insurers, and welcomes enquiries from government agencies and fleet operators. All enquiries are handled personally.