Monash Infrastructure’s theme leader Professor Graham Currie and his Public Transport Research Group win prestigious international award

Monash Infrastructure’s theme leader Professor Graham Currie and his Public Transport Research Group win prestigious international award

Monash Infrastructure Transport Theme Coordinator, Professor Graham Currie, together with his public transport research colleagues Mustafizur Rahman and Dr Carlyn Muir have won the coveted ‘William W Millar’ award for best paper in public transport. This award was made at the 95th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington DC, USA, in January 2016.  It was the second time that researchers from Monash’s Public Transport Research Group had won the award. The award is one of the most prestigious in the world in the field of transport and has been awarded only five times.

Attended by over 13,000 delegates, the TRB annual meeting is the largest transport conference in the world. Their paper titled, ‘Development and Application of a Scale to Measure Station Design Quality for Personal Safety’ was selected out of literally thousands of papers and presented the results of a research program to develop a unified measure of the design quality of train stations to reduce crime and improve the perception of passenger safety. The research focused on the main elements of CPTED: surveillance, access control or target hardening (deterring access to potential targets; a term used in the security industry), maintenance territoriality, and activity support. The scale developed was applied to four stations in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and the scores demonstrate the overall station design quality highlighting area for improvement to enhance safety. Areas for future research and implications for practice were also explored in the research.

Monash University is one of the few universities to ever win the ‘William W Millar’ award and is the only University in the world to win it TWICE! The award will be presented to the team from PTRG in front of the international research community in Washington at the 96th Annual Meeting in January 2017. Previously it was presented to Professor Currie, Dr Alexa Delbosc and James Reynolds in 2012.