The 3rd Newsletter of the African-European Dialogue Platform on Road Safety (SaferAfrica) has been recently issued with the active contribution of NTUA. This edition highlights the newly born African Road Safety Observatory, the African RSO. It also includes the implementation of the African Road Safety Action Plan: SaferAfrica Recommendations, and finally tries to answer how can an African Road Safety Observatory help to improve road safety in Africa? 
The Austrian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, the Austrian Road Safety Board (KFV) and the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) are organizing a high level road safety conference in Vienna on 13 November 2018. The conference will feature a high level panel debate “Road safety 2020+: Challenges in Human Factors, Vehicles and Infrastructure”. Conference participants will be invited to discuss priority measures and actions of the upcoming EU and national road safety strategies with politicians, experts, researchers, NGOs and representatives of the EU institutions. 
The agenda is available:
In the framework of the European Survey of Road users’ safety Attitudes (ESRA), NTUA released 3 new infographics, regarding “Drivers’ self-declared behaviour” , “Drivers’ attitudes towards unsafe behaviour” and “Drivers personal and social acceptability” .
ESRA is a joint international initiative of 26 research centers and road safety institutes; the project has surveyed road users in 38 countries on 5 continents. The purpose of this network is to collect comparable data on the opinions, attitudes, and behaviour of road users concerning road safety and mobility, and to provide scientific evidence for policy making at the national and international levels. The Updated Main Report (2017 edition) of ESRA has been published containing the results from the survey in 38 countries, including 13 Latin America countries.
A Diploma Thesis titled “Investigation of Drivers’ Preferences Towards New Innovative Vehicle Insurance Schemes” was presented by Emmanouil Konstantinopoulos in July 2018. The objective of this Diploma Thesis is to investigate the most important factors that determine the demand of Greek drivers for vehicle insurance services comprising new innovative insurance schemes of Pay As You Drive and Pay How You Drive (PAYD & PHYD), taking into account critical characteristics of driving behaviour. The analysis demonstrated that the young and the female drivers show higher probability of selecting PAYD/PHYD schemes, while the Freelancers are more reluctant to such schemes. 
The European Traffic Police Network (TISPOL) together with the European Commission DG Move Road Safety Unit have launched the project EDWARD – the European Day Without A Road Death 2018. This year the European Day without a Road Death will take place on Wednesday 19 September 2018. Several events, initiatives and promotional activity right across Europe will take place. Moreover, in the EDWARD website lots of new resources can be found, artwork can be downloaded (including images and Infographics), a countdown timer to the day itself, an interactive map and a brand new pledge to sign. 
The Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) was ranked 15th in Europe and 65th place worldwide among all Transportation Science & Technology Schools, according to the ShanghaiRanking’s Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (GRAS) 2018. NTUA road safety activities have contributed to this excellent performance. Accordingly, the NTUA Civil Engineering School was ranked 7th worldwide (3rd European) among all Civil Engineering Schools.
The next edition of the Transport Research Arena Conference (TRA 2020), will take place in Helsinki, Finland from 26-30th April 2020. With the theme of “Enabling the transformation – transport and mobility (r)evolution for smart, green and integrated society” TRA 2020 will showcase the disruption of transport and mobility RDI, as well as ways to enable and foster a Europe-wide transformation in all transport modes.
VTI – Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute in collaboration with SAFER Vehicle and Traffic Safety Center at Chalmers are organizing the 7th International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology (ICTTP), which will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 25-27 August 2020. The conference philosophy is Taking the Vision Zero Initiative into a New Decade. The Swedish Vision Zero Initiative on road safety is an ethical standpoint that no-one should die or be seriously injured in traffic. The key focus of this conference will, therefore, be on the role that traffic and transport psychology can play in reaching the ethical standpoint that no-one should die or be seriously injured in traffic by providing a common ground for future interdisciplinary research.
EuroSafe, in collaboration with Luxembourg Institute of Health, is organizing European Conference on Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion 2019 (EU-Safety 2019) which will take place on 03-04 October 2019, in Luxembourg. This conference builds on the series of European Injury Prevention Conferences successfully organised over the past decades by EuroSafe and the success of the World Safety-Conferences attended by a large European contingent. This year, the main theme is: “Research for enhancing impact of strategies and actions”. The conference will bring together stakeholders in the prevention of accidents and injuries from Europe to exchange, debate and discuss the latest results in injury research, policies and practices.
La Prevention Routière Internationale (PRI) is co-organizing along with the Arab Road Safety Organization (AROSO) and the Emirati Traffic Safety Society (ETSS) an International Conference on: ” Safer Roads & Mobility” which is going to be held in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on 24 – 25th, October, 2018.
A new Forever Open Road website has been launched by FEHRL, in order to replace the original one which was created in 2013. This new website has a much cleaner interface and is more easily navigable, enabling users to more easily find the information they require. There is also information on the National Programmes and a new multi-media section where relevant videos and presentations will be uploaded. Moreover the innovative work being undertaken in FEHRL member institutes will be highlighted.
The city of Edmonton organized the 10th Annual International Conference on Urban Traffic Safety, which took place with great success on July 9th to the 12th, 2018 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Just as all road users feel the impact of traffic safety, the responsibility to promote traffic safety was shared by many disciplines. This multidisciplinary approach is more evident now than it ever was before. When jurisdictions and agencies refer to Vision Zero Action Plans and Road Safety Strategies, their underlying theme revolves around collaborating with all partners whether they are engineers, enforcement officers, medical professionals, planners, political leaders, or public health representatives.
Risks and Countermeasures for Road Traffic of the Elderly in Europe
The Annual Road Safety Conference of the Bar Ilan University, will be held on 5th July 2018 in Tel Aviv, Israel. The conference will deal with pedestrians as well as with drivers’ behavior, the connection between them and solutions for improving safety for road users. This year the Keynote Speaker will be Prof. Neville Stanton, PhD, DSc, Head of Human Factors Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton, UK, and his presentation will concern: “Driver Reactions to Vehicle Automation”.
According to the EU road fatalities infographic of the NTUA Road Safety Observatory, twelve countries have a better performance than the EU average, namely Sweden, UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Estonia, Germany, Finland, Spain, Malta, Austria, and Luxembourg. Greece has been ranked 23rd in 2017. Estonia demonstrated the highest road fatalities rate reduction (64%) in the last decade, followed by Lithuania (57%), whereas the EU average 10-year reduction is 38% and for Greece is 51%.
Serious crashes on inter-urban roads may be slashed by a quarter over the next 30-40 years with the introduction of automated vehicles. However, the journey may be far from easy, with a mixed fleet transition and vital need for roads that cars can read, according to recently released EuroRAP report. The Report, the third in the “Roads that Cars Can Read” series, examines the relationship between road infrastructure and safety for conventional and increasingly-autonomous vehicles (AVs) and provides a framework for infrastructure safety investment.
The Annual European Safety and Reliability Conference ESREL 2018 is an international conference under the auspices of the European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA), which took place with great success on 17-21 June 2018 in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway. The topic for ESREL 2018 was “Safe Societies in a Changing World” and the goal of the conference was to advance in the understanding, modeling, and management of the complexity of the risk, safety and reliability fields characterizing our world, now and in the future. NTUA actively contributed with the following presentations:
A paper titled “Public opinion on Usage-Based Motor Insurance Schemes: a stated preference approach” authored by Dimitris Tselentis, Akis Theofilatos, George Yannis and Manos Konstantinopoulos is now published in Travel Behaviour and Society scientific Journal. This paper aims to investigate which parameters affect users’ willingness to pay for alternative usage-based motor insurance pricing schemes such as Pay-as-you-drive (PAYD) and Pay-as-how-you-drive (PHYD). Results indicated that women and smartphone owners are more likely to choose a new insurance schemes. Kilometers and cost reduction were also found to affect similarly the choice for both Usage-Based-Motor Insurance (UBI). Moreover, the higher the speed reduction imposed to the driver, the lower the probability of the UBI scheme to choose it. 
NTUA Professor George Yannis gave a Lecture at the European Commission – DG for Research and Innovation on 11 June 2018 in Brussels, titled “Road Safety in Africa and Beyond“. The Lecture focused on various aspects of road safety in Africa and worldwide, on the the SaferAfrica research project and on the respective EU international cooperation policies in the field, followed by a vivid discussion on key road safety problems and the EC role for potential policies, programmes and measures for the improvement of road safety in Africa and worldwide.
Every year Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, loses many valuable human lives and incurs enormous economic costs caused by road accidents. The Traffic Safety Agency of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in cooperation with the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) are organizing the 7th International Conference Road Safety in Local Community, which will take place in Banja Luca, Bosnia and Herzegovina on 25-26 October 2018 aiming to constantly strengthen and develop capacities at the local level and create groups of experts who will have enough enthusiasm, courage and will to fight with this problem facing the country.
