Australian Conference on Road Research.

This article presents information on the third biennial conference of the Australian Road Research Board. The conference was held in Sydney from 5-9 September, 1966. It was attended by nearly 500 delegates and was opened by Mr. R.W. Askin, Premier of New South Wales. The conference comprised of 21 technical sessions of which 9 were dedicated to traffic or transport research. In one of the sessions, R.R. Allan presented his study on the binomial model of traffic flow. The time scale in Allan's binomial model for single-lane traffic flow was divided into equal cells and was extended slightly by allowing the times at which vehicles pass a point to have any distribution within the time cells. The model has been tested against a set of data used by D.J. Buckley. After introducing a displacement to give a minimum headway of about 0.45 sec, the three-parameter model fitted the data almost as well as Buckley's four-parameter model. However, an unsatisfactory feature of the model is that the counting distribution always had a variance less than the mean. The second study being presented by Allan in that particular session was a rigorous account of the use and properties of generating functions with particular reference to their application in deriving properties of models of road traffic.