The Victorian bus industry, like many other Australian and international jurisdictions, must meet safety regulation requirements including bus safety inspections with both annual mandatory independent inspections and more regular documented self-inspection processes.
This project aims to understand the road safety impacts of the Victorian bus inspection regime from the following aspects. A review of annual inspection results is intended to identify the vulnerable vehicle groups and components and better understand what aspects of safety inspections are having greater impacts on road safety. An investigation on bus operators to understand their inspection practice and their expertise on safety inspections has been conducted to help achieve more effective inspection standards. Benchmarking of the Victorian bus inspection regime will assist assessing multiple aspects of the current one, for example, frequency of mandatory independent inspections and provide valuable insights. The project will also seek to understand general risk factors of bus accidents to better accommodate inspections in the context of other risks.
This project is part of the Sustainable and Effective Public Transport – Graduate Research Industry Partnership (SEPT-GRIP) and was supervised by Dr David Logan. The project was undertaken by Jianrong Qiu and sponsored by BusVic and Monash University.
The thesis is available online here.