SafePaths Research Project

Research Project Overview

SafePaths is a research project undertaken by The Planning and Transport Research Centre (PATREC) at The University of Western Australia, funded by the Australian Government's National Road Safety Action Grants Program (Grant Number: NRSAGP-RD1-A52) to enhance the safety of shared paths for active transport modes like cycling, eRideables and pedestrians. This community incident reporting portal works alongside advanced video analytics to identify high-risk locations, risky behaviours, and gaps in current design guidelines.

The project addresses a significant underreporting problem: incidents and crashes not involving motor vehicles are poorly documented, and user behaviours in mixed-traffic environments on shared paths are not well understood.

Your participation matters. By reporting incidents and near-misses through this platform, you help us build a comprehensive picture of safety challenges that are currently invisible in official data. Your observations will directly inform evidence-based recommendations for safer shared path design and contribute to establishing baseline conditions for evaluating future safety improvements.

Research Objectives

This project investigates how community-sourced incident data, combined with objective video observations, can inform evidence-based improvements to shared path infrastructure design. The research focuses on developing a systematic framework for ongoing safety data collection, including an integrated database that curates both video-derived and community-reported incident and near-miss data.

By participating in this research, you contribute to our understanding of safety challenges on shared paths and help establish baseline conditions for evaluating future infrastructure treatments.

Information Capture Methods

This platform enables community members to report incidents, near-misses, and safety concerns on shared paths. The system captures location-based observations, including geospatial tagging, incident categorisation, multimedia attachments, and details about parties involved.

Data collected through this portal will be integrated with video analytics findings to identify patterns, high-risk locations, and inform design recommendations aligned with Safe System principles. The research examines how these methods can be accessible and user-friendly, with mobile-optimised interfaces to encourage reporting.

Privacy

This platform does not collect personal or identifying information. All incident reports are anonymous unless you choose to provide contact details.

Providing your email address is entirely optional. If you do provide an email address, the research team may contact you for additional information about your reported incident, although follow-up contact is not guaranteed. Your email address will be kept confidential and will not be shared with anyone beyond the research team at The University of Western Australia.

All data collected through this platform will be stored securely and used only for research purposes in accordance with The University of Western Australia's human research ethics approval.