Max Cameron accepts Emeritus Professor title
Professor Max Cameron will soon add the title of Emeritus Professor to his list of achievements as he retires from the Monash University Accident Research Centre (MUARC) at the end of the year.
Max has been an integral senior researcher at MUARC since joining the Centre in 1990 on secondment from VicRoads.
Specialising in road crash data analysis and countermeasure evaluation, Max has published 110 papers and been the lead or key author of 250 reports to State, Federal and international government departments and other organisations.
His expertise has been sought around the world, providing advice to governments and research institutes in countries such as France, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the Netherlands.
While his retirement heralds the end of an era in some sense, he will continue to contribute to MUARC through his emeritus position.
“I’ve been working for a long time and people tell me I may not know what to do with myself. Fortunately, I believe I can stay on as an Emeritus and continue to work something like what I’ve been doing before,” Max said.
He said he hopes to be involved in projects and share his years of experience.
“I still have things to contribute. There is a current project looking at automated traffic enforcement in Victoria. It’s a fundamental relook at things like speed cameras and new technology. In a sense it’s re-evaluating the original mobile speed cameras that haven’t truly been re-evaluated since the early 1990s. So, I think there’s a lot of worthwhile things to do.”
Max describes his initial foray into road safety as partly accidental. He was looking for a summer vacation job and his uncle happened to be secretary of the newly-formed Australian Road Research Board (ARRB) which was based in Melbourne and needed someone to provide technical help.
After five or six years working at ARRB, Max headed overseas to enjoy life in his 20s. He didn’t expect to think too much about road safety research again. However, when he returned to Australia in 1972, the Federal government was showing a newfound commitment to road safety and its Department of Shipping and Transport was then based in Melbourne. Max was hired as a consultant statistician by Peter Vulcan, then head of the Road Safety Research Section and who later became Founding Director of MUARC.
When MUARC was founded in 1987, Max knew he needed to make a move.
“I was managing an internal road safety research cell within VicRoads at the time, but I figured MUARC was the place to be if I wanted to do meaningful road safety research,” he said.
“Simultaneously, two parliamentary committees in Victoria and New South Wales had conducted inquiries into vehicle safety. They concluded that a car safety rating system was desirable. The question was whether it could be done with existing police data and I thought to myself, ‘yes, I could make a fist of this’. I used it as the major justification to be seconded to MUARC.”
Max developed the concept of the rating system which is now known as the Used Car Safety Ratings, one of the most high-profile outputs from MUARC each year. His “road trauma chain” underpinned the ratings by showing how the fatal and severe injury risk posed by a car to its occupants could be measured in two steps. He nominates the ratings as one of his proudest achievements at MUARC, in addition to the Traffic Enforcement Resource Allocation Model (TERAM) which estimates how many fatal and serious injury crashes can be eliminated through combined countermeasures such as Random Breath Testing and the various types of speed cameras.
Evaluating countermeasures has been a hallmark of Max’s research. As a statistician, he has measured the success of pivotal initiatives such as the wearing of bicycle helmets, increased Random Breath Testing and the TAC’s memorable mass advertising campaign in the 90s.
He says the most satisfying policy change to stem from these evaluations is the increased use of mobile speed cameras.
“The mobile speed cameras have proven their merit consistently in the three or four Australian states that we’ve done extensive research, and I think that’s surprised the overseas audience,” he says.
“Stuart Newstead and I have shown very clearly that in Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and the ACT the mobile cameras are by far the best investment if you want real effects.”
While retirement provides the chance to reflect, Max’s eagerness to keep contributing to MUARC’s research is reinforced when asked if he has a farewell message for his colleagues.
“Don’t forget me!” he quips. “I am still keen to be involved in MUARC projects.”