VicRoads is one of the most open-data-engaged Victorian government departments and agencies. On Wednesday night, Adrian Porteous, Evan Quick and Phil Reid came to fill us all in on open data activities happening inside VicRoads – and to listen to what the community is looking for next. Need some data? They’re all ears – try one of them on Twitter, or maybe even Suggest a Dataset.

First, an overview. VicRoads has an enormous amount of data, broadly divided into road infrastructure, traffic, crashes, registration and licensing, and other spatial data (such as preferred heavy vehicle routes). They have 20 datasets on data.vic.gov.au, and another 20 spatial datasets on their ESRI open data portal. They also have some useful applications which aren’t really open data, like CrashStats and VicTraffic.There’s some pretty useful stuff there, like the speed zones and annual traffic volumes per road segment.

But by their own admission, they have a long way to go. They have something like 650 potential datasets, many of which could be very useful if made open. For example, there are on average 5 bridge collisions per day across the network. Releasing the location and height of every bridge could lead to apps and maps to reduce that. They have the data, but it’s not perfect. They have “weight in motion” data (are trucks overweight?) and lots of others.

There were great questions from the audience, like where to go to find information about trucks improperly using residential roads and how to access realtime traffic light data (it’s hard but in progress).

Finally, a sneak preview of VicRoads street-level imagery on Mapillary, which has just received final approval for a mass import of imagery across the whole VicRoads network.