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25.01.2022 Shout out to Triple M The Border for having us on to have a chat with Lu and Matt this morning about our study into the impacts of COVID-19 on the traffic levels in and around Wodonga - great to share our insights about local traffic issues with local people!

23.01.2022 As a business based in Albury-Wodonga, Spotto Consulting is very proud to support the APT Awards Border Region, celebrating amateur performance in theatre on the Border and beyond. We're particularly excited to be sponsoring the Best Youth/School Production, and want to congratulate the nominees in this category: Trinity Anglican College Albury-Wodonga for Phantom of the Opera BYTESized Productions for Disney's Camp Rock Murray High School - NSW DEC for Disney's Mulan Jr... Wodonga Senior Secondary College for Matilda: The Musical Thanks to the hard-working organisers, adjudicators and everyone involved in making this event happen. Good luck to all the nominees - tune in to the awards presentation on Saturday 2 May 2020 via the link below! See more

22.01.2022 Continuing to explore our recent study of traffic levels around Wodonga and the impact of COVID-19, it's interesting to observe the reductions at individual intersections, and to compare the difference between weekdays and weekends. We looked at the difference in traffic between late Feb/Early March (pre-COVID) and again in Late April/Early May (post-COVID). There's three main groups to look at: 1. Signals in and around the Wodonga CBD were down by 29% on weekdays, and 30% on... weekends; 2. Signals along Melrose Drive, which has more of a commuter use, were down by 34% on weekdays and weekends; and 3. Signals at the Hume Freeway/Lincoln Causeway, which are the two busiest locations, were down by 39% on weekdays and 47% on weekends. We saw that activity within the Wodonga CBD was significantly reduced, but not as much as travel between Wodonga and Albury. Clearly it wasn't just people staying home from work and school through the week, but people were also staying away from sport, retail activities and recreation in Albury on the weekends. See more

21.01.2022 Currently travelling to a job on the NSW South Coast and trying to help out as many of the drought and bushfire-affected communities as possible. Basically doubling up our spending as we go - first stop is in Jugiong, where we've paid for 2 coffees and muffins whilst only having one. Businesses can choose to pocket the extra money or give items to their other customers as they see fit. Hopefully we can help a bit - let's get some money in those tills! #supportsmallbusiness #supportlocal #bringanemptyesky #bushfirerecovery #droughtrelief #nswfires #nswsouthcoast

20.01.2022 We've been hearing a lot about how COVID has affected traffic on city streets, but ever wonder what's going on with our highways in the country? Well I'm glad you asked! We used the RMS Traffic Volume Viewer application to investigate the changes on the Hume Highway near Gundagai in southern NSW. Available from their website, the Viewer gives you data on traffic volumes each hour, in each direction, and also identifies light and heavy vehicles. We chose this spot because it's... on the main highway between our two largest cities of Sydney and Melbourne, and its also slightly north of the Sturt Highway, which links to Adelaide. We were able to compare 2019 patterns with 2020 data up to the end of July. What we found is explored in a bit more detail in each of the slides, but in summary: -Volume of traffic has been down about 15% overall; -Volume of light vehicles is highly variable - it's dropped about 40% overall, but in April the drop was nearly 70%; -Heavy vehicles volumes have remained remarkably consistent, even growing slightly (about 5%) - thanks to our truckies for keeping the nation moving! -There's been no significant shift in the time of day that light or heavy vehicles are travelling. See more

20.01.2022 Staff from Spotto Consulting listened in to a fascinating webinar this afternoon. Presented by the AITPM, it explored the issue of data collection for traffic and transport professionals in the time of COVID-19. Quite simply: how do we count cars if there aren't any on the road or in the car parks? Three very different presentations on data sources by Ali Inayathusein from VLC, public transport data by Tim Spalding from the Victorian Department of Transport, and some big que...stions on the validity of data from John Reid of Austraffic. Thanks to the presenters for their time, and the AITPM - Leadership in Traffic and Transport for hosting - we've had some projects deferred due to the inability to collect data that represents a "typical" day, and today's webinar gave us some really good ideas on how we will approach those projects in the (hopefully not-too-distant) future! See more

15.01.2022 The end of a long day of surveys and site work - we are grateful to see the road home being highlighted for us! #roadtrip #waggawagga #riverina #traffic #transport #roadsafety #trafficengineering #transportplanning

10.01.2022 "Approved" - definitely one of the words we like hearing! Forming part of a diverse project team, Spotto Consulting prepared a Traffic Impact Assessment Report for a serviced apartment development in High Street, Wodonga. Comprising 80 serviced apartments, conference facilities, restaurant and off-street parking, we were excited to hear that the development was approved recently by the City of Wodonga. We're very happy for our clients on this one, and look forward to seeing the finished product!

10.01.2022 Another success for Spotto Consulting and our clients! We were recently involved in the preparation of a Traffic Impact Assessment for a 6 storey mixed-use development in Wagga Wagga. The development will include commercial space and off-street car parking on the ground floor, with apartments in the levels above. The development assessment report from Council stated that: "The application was referred to Council’s Senior Traffic Officer for comment. In discussions with Manage...ment of that section, no objection to the proposal was raised." Council subsequently approved this $10M project, and we look forward to seeing it take shape. If you think you might need help ticking all the boxes with a traffic study for your development, chances are Spotto Consulting can help you! See more

10.01.2022 Delineation refers to the use of linemarking signage, guide posts, "cats eyes" and other devices to guide motorists along the road. It is particularly important in rural areas at night. The photos below were taken during a recent road safety audit of roadworks on the Newell Highway. The existing road is missing guide posts, many of the reflective cats eyes on the centre and edge lines are either missing or obscured, and in some places the linemarking is faded. Each of these things makes it that little bit harder to follow the correct path along the road. Contrast this with the delineation for the roadworks: clear linemarking, highly visible cats eyes and supplemented with bollards to identify the edge of the roadworks. Keep an eye out the next time you're on the road!

09.01.2022 Inspired by a recent webinar from AITPM - Leadership in Traffic and Transport, we thought we'd have a look at the traffic levels in our own backyard of Wodonga to see what's been happening throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic. We took data from 11 sets of signals across Wodonga. This data is freely available from data.vic.gov.au, and lets us look at numbers of vehicles passing across detector loops at traffic signals. We looked at data over a 10 week period from late Feb 2020 to ...early May 2020. Some of the things we found were: -Traffic levels overall were down 34% on a weekday, and 38% on weekends; -Traffic levels in the Wodonga CBD were down by more than a quarter on a typical weekday; and -Traffic levels on the Lincoln Causeway (connecting Wodonga to nearby Albury) were down by almost half on weekends. The graphs in this post give you a bit of an overview of the changes across the network. In coming days, we'll be exploring this data in a bit more detail - stay tuned for more insights! See more

07.01.2022 Covered some ground while doing parking surveys recently - 20,000+ steps and 16+ km!!!! Sometimes the simplest ways of collecting data are still the most effective. These distances were covered on foot with the good old clipboard as part of a parking study for one of our clients in Wodonga. We do these surveys at 2 hour intervals across the day, and the data allows us to see how parking across the area varies over the day - where it's busiest, where there's spare capacity and so on. It also gives us a lot of qualitative and anecdotal data - for example, seeing the same work vehicles parked out the front of business premises all day long in short term car parks. PS - Note that we did the 6pm and 8pm surveys by car, otherwise the numbers would have been even higher!

04.01.2022 Once again, we're looking at the impact of COVID-19 on traffic levels in and around Wodonga. One interesting thing to note is the difference in impact on commuter traffic versus CBD traffic. Commuter traffic typically sees a high peak around 8AM as people travel to work and school. This is usually a sharp peak, as school and work start times are often similar. In the afternoon, the peak is lower, but longer - students typically finish school at 3.30PM, while many workers fin...ish at the same time, or later at 4PM, 5PM or whenever. CBD traffic has a different pattern. Levels start off low in the day, and steadily rise to their highest levels during business hours (10AM-4PM). We can see this in action in Wodonga by looking at two different signalised intersections: 1. Melrose Drive near Mars Petcare, which demonstrates the typical commuter peak; and 2. High Street and Elgin Boulevarde, in the heart of Wodonga's CBD. It's interesting to note the huge reduction in commuter peaks (up to 45%), as students and workers stayed home from closed schools and businesses. The CBD traffic was consistently 20-25% lower across the day. See more

02.01.2022 The image below shows a roughly 1km long queue of traffic on Corrys Road in Thurgoona this morning. This has arisen as a result of works on the Thurgoona Drive interchange on the Hume Freeway - people are naturally enough seeking alternative routes to get from their homes in Thurgoona to jobs in Albury and Wodonga. As a traffic engineer, it's always interesting to see responses to things like this. Do you just take the next closest interchange and wait in the queue? Do you t...ake a different route - possibly a "rat run" through the back streets, which might be longer, but at least you're moving? Do you research your route and find a different one altogether, one that's actually better than your regular and makes you think "why didn't I do this ages ago?" Do you give the car a miss altogether and try a bike or the bus? Do you work from home (if that's an option for you) and avoid the traffic altogether? Events like this always give us an opportunity to consider our travel patterns and use of the transport network. We hope you got to work OK, and that you travel safely while works are being undertaken on the freeway. See more