Bamdad Babak - Eastern Suburbs Area Manager
Meet Bamdad Babak - passionate about looking at the roads as a whole network in his role as one of two Area Managers for Smarter Roads in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
What’s your work background?
I am a Chartered Civil Engineer and have been with VicRoads and DoT for 15 years. I have worked in traffic-signal related areas, including signal design, signal operation, real-time operation, event planning, monitoring and numerous acting roles including Team Leader in the Traffic Management Centre.
As the 2010 recipient of the prestigious Kerry Burke Scholarship at VicRoads, I travelled across the world and discussed activities, challenges, KPIs and concerns with transport authorities and gathered valuable experience on worldwide best practise in network optimisation, lane/road closure planning and ITS applications in traffic management.
How did you come to join the Smarter Roads program and what was your interest in the program?
In January 2021, I was appointed as Area Manager for Melbourne’s eastern suburbs in the new Congestion Management Team, which has been developed as a part of the Smarter Roads program. I am interested in Traffic Light Network Optimisation (TLNO) which I had practiced for years prior to the program. I found the optimisation process is now more targeted and streamlined compared to the traditional process.
What are your impressions of the program?
Traffic congestion costs the Victorian economy billions of dollars every year. DoT tries to minimise this as much as possible. Measuring the optimisation process in terms of direct benefits to the community has always been a challenge for our traffic signal teams. My overseas colleagues have similar types of challenges.
As a part of Smarter Roads program now, there are defined set of KPIs to measure our success when we update traffic light sequencing based on Austroads guidelines. This makes the TLNO process more rational, and our justification for future decision-makings will be backed by measurable data and facts. I am quite excited about this aspect of the program.
I am also very excited about the development of a need Optimal Reality tool, which I am directly involved in. Having an Optimal Reality tool available next year, it will be much more efficient for us to get network vision faster and therefore address incidents, issues, faults, and concerns in an optimised manner.
You’re an Area Manager in the Congestion Management Team. What does that involve?
The role of the Congestion Management Team is to improve the performance of the arterial road network for all road users. The Congestion Management Team is the custodian of road network performance, bringing an operational lens to engagement with internal and external stakeholders, and implementing an operating model that leverages the new Smarter Roads assets, systems and data to support operational excellence in the real-time operations context. We are also ensuring strategic alignment of long-term interventions in line with Movement & Place Principles.
How will the work you’re doing make it easier for people and freight to move around Melbourne’s roads?
The work that we are doing will tackle recurring congestion issues and facilitate removal of unplanned network barriers such as car breakdowns, system malfunctions, accidents, hardware faults, etc. We’ll be working together with our operations team to use new systems, tools and data to do this faster and minimise the impacts on the network, by assisting with detour selections and traffic signal changes. This will lead to faster, safer, and more reliable journeys for all transport modes in Melbourne.
Get to know more of our Smarter Roads team here.