The Gap in Driver Perception

I have spent a good part of the past week thinking about driver perception, prompted partly by some thoughtful comments in Linkedin on my last post. One theme kept returning: people use “saw” to mean two different things, and in a collision case the difference decides who is at fault. Did the driver see the...

Teaching Driving Skills

I have driven for decades. I can do it without thinking, which is the point: the skill has long since dropped below conscious effort. Then I started teaching my eldest, and discovered I could not explain it fast enough to be useful. That gap surprised me. The problem was not that I lacked the knowledge...

Webinar on Safe System Approach

I had the pleasure of co-presenting a webinar for the Society of Automotive Engineers Australasia yesterday (28 May 2026), on the changing role of vehicles in the Safe System approach to road safety. My thanks to SAE-A for the invitation, to the members who gave up an hour of their afternoon, and to my co-presenter...

Interview Insights

This morning I watched Mike Nelson’s interview with Matt Moore, who leads the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) in the United States. The subject was a major new study HLDI published in December 2025 examining the real-world effectiveness of Mazda’s advanced driver assistance systems across model years 2015 to 2023. I found several findings to...

Dangerous Intersections

Some intersections are dangerous because they announce themselves. The geometry is compressed, sightlines are constrained, the signs are prominent, and the driver arrives with their attention already raised. These locations are difficult to get right, but they are at least legible as problems. Other intersections are dangerous for the opposite reason. The approach is open...

Threshold Treatments in Victoria

Threshold treatments and continuous footpath designs are appearing in increasing numbers across Victorian local government areas. The intent is legible from the streetscape: by raising the pavement at a driveway crossing or minor road entry to match the footpath level, and by carrying footpath materials and markings across the junction, the design signals to drivers...

Evidence in Road Crash Matters

A significant proportion of the Expert Witness briefs we receive in a road crash matter in Victoria arrive at a point where the available evidence has already narrowed. The crash scene has been cleared, sometimes within hours of the event. The vehicle has been assessed by an insurer and repaired or written off. No one...

The Changing Landscape of Vehicle Safety

The vehicles on Australian roads today are, in a material engineering sense, different from the vehicles that the legal system, the insurance market, and the occupational health and safety framework were designed to govern. The gap between vehicle capability and the frameworks that are supposed to absorb it is widening, and the consequences are showing...

Design Standards Compliance

One of the most persistent misreadings in crash investigation — and in the legal proceedings that follow — is the treatment of design standards compliance as a finding. The police report notes nothing out of the ordinary with the road geometry. VicRoads produces drawings showing the intersection met Austroads guidelines at the time of construction...

Event Data Recorders in Litigation

Event data recorders are now a routine feature of road crash litigation in Australia. If the vehicle involved was manufactured in the last fifteen years, there is a reasonable chance it recorded something in the seconds before impact. That data is often central to how a matter is framed — by police, by insurers, and...