Context: Transport for NSW is currently in the process of rolling out level 2 ETCS across the Sydney Trains network. The HF team is exploring the potential workload impacts on key roles including the Signaller role, which will face significant change with the introduction of the Traffic Management System (TMS).
Zeilstra et al. (2016) and Balfe, et al. (2012) have shown that whilst automation can reduce workload for Signallers, failures in technology can cause greater disruptions and higher workload when compared to Signallers using a lower level of and no automation.

Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate workload impacts to support the introduction of ETCS L2 for Signallers.

Approach: The workload analysis started with a desktop review of ETCS workload related literature. The output from this review was used to support a workshop with SMEs to identify key factors that might impact workload for Signallers. A scenario-based simulator study with trained TMS super users followed, to understand potential workload impacts.

Results: Several tasks that may decrease operator workload were identified and contrasted with tasks that may increase workload such as managing temporary speed restrictions. Scenarios were used to explore the impact of ETCS L2 activities on workload levels. Mitigations were identified, highlighting the importance of training, the impact of timetables and rosters and the need to provide decision tools.

Implications: The change to ETCS L2 operations is significant, but Signallers are flexible and quick to adapt to new systems. Workload levels can reflect system familiarity and scenario complexity. HFE is critical to understanding the role impacts, developing training and providing assurance.

Human Factors (HF) Integration is a structured process that embeds human-centred principles into the system engineering lifecycle to ensure that infrastructure is designed with consideration of user capabilities, limitations, and needs. Within major projects, this process applies a systematic and evidence-based approach to identify, assess, track, and resolve impacts arising from changes in human-system interactions. Effective HF integration is closely aligned with established risk management frameworks and is coordinated with broader safety and assurance processes throughout the project lifecycle. Early incorporation of HF principles is critical, as it enables the timely identification of end-user requirements and opportunities to enhance performance, ensuring these considerations meaningfully influence design outcomes.
The New Gold Coast Stations project, delivered by the Cross River Rail Delivery Authority (CRRDA), represents a significant transport investment aimed at supporting population growth in South East Queensland. The project includes three new stations at Pimpama, Hope Island, and Merrimac, forming part of the wider Cross River Rail program to improve regional connectivity. The stations are designed to enhance access to public transport, reduce congestion, and integrate effectively with existing networks.
Each station incorporates features such as parking facilities, passenger drop-off areas, pedestrian and cycling links, accessibility provisions, and safety enhancements including lighting and CCTV. HF integration plays a key role in ensuring these elements support safe, efficient, and intuitive use by diverse user groups, including passengers, staff, and maintainers.
Key HF considerations identified for the project relate to the interface between station design and human interaction. These include accessibility, maintainability, and operational usability. Addressing these factors ensures that the stations not only meet technical and operational requirements but also deliver a safe, inclusive, and user-centred transport experience.

Context:
European Train Control System (ETCS) is a digital signalling system, novel to Australia, currently being introduced to the Queensland rail network. Operational testing of the signalling system is a critical step in the success of the operational readiness process that brings the system into service. Whilst success when testing the system’s technical component can be, and usually is, more easily defined, the specific measures of success for the human component are often neglected. As sociotechnical systems become increasingly complex, determining whether operators possess the knowledge and skills to safely operate these systems is increasingly important.

Aim:
This presentation explores how incorporating a Human Factors (HF) perspective in operational testing creates ‘the perfect fit’ to ensure the system, people, and processes are ready for service.

Approach:
An HF perspective was incorporated into operational testing, shifting the focus from demonstrating the system’s administrative controls to testing operator capability across different system states. To achieve this, ETCS capabilities were decomposed into concise, observable statements known as ‘testable questions,’ which were incorporated into test scripts covering a range of diverse scenarios.

Results:
The ‘testable questions’ allowed test observers to assess whether operators demonstrated key behaviours from a range of skillsets, providing insight into operator knowledge rather than testing a base understanding of isolated processes. Where observation was an inadequate validation method, debrief questions provided further insight into operator knowledge. The results enabled robust data collection to measure behaviour and validate operator performance.

Implications:
Existing testing approaches have limited capacity to identify sociotechnical system deficiencies because operator knowledge is poorly assessed. Incorporating HF principles prioritises capability over compliance and can enhance operational testing through assessment of skill-, knowledge-, and rule-based behaviour. By demonstrating the success of human and technical system components, and their interactions, the assurance argument for safe ETCS operation is strengthened.

The 2024 grounding incidents involving passenger vessel Fiordland Navigator, the inter-island ferry Aratere, pilot vessel Takitimu II, and the Royal New Zealand Navy hydrographic and dive tender HMNZS Manawanui represent one of the most significant clusters of maritime navigational failures in recent New Zealand maritime history. Although each incident occurred within differing operational contexts, including naval hydrographic, ferry, pilotage, and passenger operations, common themes emerged involving cognitive overload, degraded situational awareness, fatigue, organisational drift, reliance on increasingly complex automated navigation systems, and human–machine interface misalignment (Endsley, 1995; Parasuraman, Sheridan, & Wickens, 2008; Rasmussen, 1997).

This paper applies a comparative maritime human factors case-study methodology to examine the interactions among navigational error, cognitive workload, organisational safety culture, degraded operating environments, and technology-integrated bridge systems within modern high-risk maritime operations. Drawing on official Royal New Zealand Navy Court of Inquiry findings and New Zealand Transport Accident Investigation Commission reports, the paper discusses that these incidents should not be viewed as isolated navigational failures, but as outcomes of broader socio-technical system vulnerabilities emerging across maritime domains (Reason, 1990; Hollnagel, 2014).

The paper proposes a Maritime Human–Machine Misalignment Framework explaining how operational complexity, cognitive compression, degraded automation awareness, environmental stressors, and organisational resilience failures interact to progressively reduce navigational recovery opportunities. Across all cases, vessel systems largely functioned as designed; however, bridge teams became increasingly cognitively separated from the systems they were supervising, significantly degrading safe navigation decision-making.

The findings suggest that future maritime safety frameworks must evolve beyond procedural compliance models and increasingly integrate cognitive resilience engineering, adaptive Bridge Resource Management, fatigue-risk engineering, automation-awareness training, resilient organisational leadership, and human-centred systems design (Hollnagel, 2014; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2015). The paper contributes to existing contemporary maritime human factors discourse by bridging lessons identified across naval and merchant maritime domains within increasingly automated operational environments.

Context
The Pilbara road network operates within a rapidly evolving system shaped by heavy vehicle demand, remote conditions, and increasing technological and operational complexity. Ensuring a “fit” between human capabilities and system design is critical, yet traditional road safety approaches have not fully accounted for how drivers interact with changing environments, technologies, and organisational constraints. Persistent serious incidents highlight gaps between system design and real-world human performance.
Aim
This study investigated the human factors influencing safety outcomes on Pilbara roads and assessed how effectively existing road, vehicle, and operational systems support driver capabilities, limitations, and behaviours.
Approach
A systems-based Human Factors approach was applied, combining crash data analysis, stakeholder engagement, driver interviews, and desktop site observations. The study examined interactions between drivers, tasks, vehicles, and the road environment to identify factors affecting safe performance and opportunities for improvement.
Results
Findings demonstrate that safety risks emerge from misalignments between human capabilities and system demands. Extended low-stimulation driving, fatigue, and heat stress reduce vigilance, while operational pressures influence decision-making and risk tolerance. Road design features such as long, undifferentiated alignments and inconsistent overtaking opportunities fail to adequately support driver attention and safe interactions. The interface between heavy and light vehicles illustrates both effective and imperfect system “fit,” particularly under conditions of speed differential and limited overtaking visibility.
Implications
The study illustrates how human-centered design can improve system performance by better aligning infrastructure, operations, and technologies with human needs. As transport systems evolve, defining a “perfect fit” will require integrating HFE principles into road design, fatigue management, and emerging vehicle technologies. The findings demonstrate the value of HFE as a transferable approach for addressing complex, cross-sector challenges and highlight the need to more effectively communicate its role in delivering safer, more adaptive systems.

Psychosocial hazards are now recognised as critical contributors to harm in high risk industries, including mining, where the consequences of silence can be catastrophic. The Western Australian Work Health and Safety Act (2020), associated psychosocial regulations require Persons Conducting a Business or Undertaking (PCBUs) to identify, assess, and implement positive controls for psychosocial risks. This aligns with the WA 2024–2034 Work Health and Safety Strategy, which identifies psychosocial factors as one of the top contributors to fatalities and serious injuries.
Despite this regulatory shift, peer reviewed research consistently shows that 20–30% of workers do not feel safe to speak up about concerns, hazards, or early warning signs (Morrison, 2014; Detert & Edmondson, 2011; Milliken et al., 2003). In high hazard environments, this silence represents a critical control failure. When weak signals are suppressed, organisations lose the opportunity to intervene before incidents escalate.
Drawing on lived experience with catastrophic system failure early in my career, combined with contemporary research and mining sector insights, this paper argues that silence itself must be treated as a hazard. It presents a practical, systems based framework — The Psychosocial Control Loop — that integrates cultural, operational, and psychosocial controls to close the gap between regulatory intent and real world practice. The paper includes conceptual diagrams, fatality trend interpretations, and mining specific examples to support implementation.
Ultimately, this paper proposes that creating psychologically safe, high reliability organisations requires more than compliance: it requires designing workplaces where people feel safe to speak before something breaks. There must be another way and this paper outlines a path forward.

Lightning Talk

Aim
This lightning talk presents the development of a Travel Behaviour Framework for a transport authority in a Middle Eastern city, examining how human factors (HF) principles can be applied to shift travel behaviour toward public and active transport in a highly car-dependent context.

Methods/Approach
An evidence-led approach was adopted, combining a structured literature review of 30+ behaviour change theories and 75+ global studies. The research focussed on identifying behavioural determinants influencing travel choices across commuters, residents and visitors.
A human factors lens was applied by conceptualising behaviour as an interaction between:
• Individual factors (capability, cognition, habits)
• Social influences (norms, peer behaviours)
• Contextual conditions (infrastructure, accessibility, system design)
Established models (e.g. COM-B) were used to bridge the intention–behaviour gap and translate insights into measurable constructs and interventions.

Results
The framework identified that travel behaviour in a Middle Eastern city is shaped by interdependent psychological, social and environmental determinants, rather than isolated factors. It provided:
• A structured method to diagnose behavioural drivers
• Segmentation of target users and behaviours
• A toolkit to design, prioritise and evaluate interventions
The framework enabled the client to move from high-level policy to practical, scalable interventions tailored to a car-dependent system.

Discussion/Implications
This work demonstrates that behaviour change is fundamentally a human factors challenge, requiring alignment between human capabilities, system design, and environmental constraints. The “perfect fit” emerges when transport systems are designed not just for efficiency, but for real human behaviour, acknowledging cognitive biases, habits and context.
For the HF discipline, this highlights:
• The value of integrating behavioural science into system design
• The need to design interventions, not just infrastructure
• The role of HF in enabling sustainable, user-centred mobility transitions