With a master’s degree in Transportation and a formidable 25 year career as a Senior Road Safety Engineer, Mike offers specialist technical advice to Local Governments, Councils, and the NZ Transport Agency, and overseas to Authorities and Governments. His role in the Christchurch transportation team requires him to provide national technical support in road safety systems including Road Safety Auditing, Active Transport design, Safe Systems, and vulnerable road user advice. Mike extensive experience in road safety (utilising the Safe System approach), traffic control, strategy studies, health and safety, existing road safety inspections, road safety audits, crash reduction studies, traffic engineering, maintenance contract and construction projects. His role in developing leading systems and processes in road safety ensures that new considerations are applied alongside current process to achieve a holistic outcome for road safety.

Ben is an experienced transportation engineer with expertise in highway and cycleway design, safety analysis, traffic engineering, construction planning and speed data analysis. He worked as a transportation engineer in Miami and Chicago, USA for five years before joining Abley in 2018. Ben has a broad range of transportation experience from both the private and public sectors.

Public space is a city’s literal common ground - the spaces where people come together as friends, neighbours and citizens. They are the places we share; streets, parks, markets, public buildings and more, and are the sites whereby most human exchange occurs. An exchange that the social, cultural, environmental and economic values of our communities depend upon for survival. Yet, for decades our urban planning ideologies have placed little value on the human dimension and the effect that the built environment has on people - their movements, behaviours and quality of life. Nearly every major urban centre records data for traffic volumes, average speeds, vehicle occupancy, delay times, heavy traffic, light traffic and more, yet very little data is recorded about people in the built environment - who they are, how they move, where they go, or how long they stay. Despite this, we spend billions of dollars on public spaces, often with very little appreciation for who our users are and what needs they might have. Representing a shift in this trend, and focusing their research instead on the human dimension, a number of international and national cities, Dunedin included, have initiated studies of public life, to better understand who their city’s users are and what their needs are. Why? Because once we have a clearer understanding of how people interact with public space we are better equipped to help make these places better meet the needs of the people who live, work and visit them. Drawing on public life studies of Auckland, Queenstown, Nelson and Dunedin, this talk will examine the techniques for gathering measurable, human-centred data, and how this data can be applied to inform active transport and recreation outcomes, and the social, cultural environmental and economic roles that these play within our urban communities.

Andrew joined the NZ Transport Agency in 2005. More recently his role has focussed on leading the Road Efficiency Group, an industry partnership responsible for developing and implementing tools and philosophy to drive more effective and more customer focussed transport system delivery. The REG programme is underpinned by the one network road classification. Andrew previously worked in local government and has a vast range of experience in asset and network management, including leading safety and CBD revitalisation programmes.