NRSO

PIARC – Implementation of National Safe System Policies: A Challenge, May 2020

The World Road Association – PIARC recently published a Report titled “Implementation of National Safe System Policies: A Challenge”. This report provides a contribution to global road safety through a summary of National Safe System Policies and Implementation in relation to the Safe System approach. The report also highlights the steps that low, middle and high-income countries alike can take to accelerate progress towards Safe System outcomes. The report includes a number of key findings from a review and survey of international practice related to national Safe System policies and implementation, which are listed below and expanded further in the body of the report. The focus of this report is related to infrastructure road safety elements, with limited focus on the institutional arrangements and management of safety.

ETSC – How to improve the safety of goods vehicles in the EU?, May 2020

The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) has published the 39th PIN Flash Report “How to improve the safety of goods vehicles in the EU?“. This report examines the toll transport of goods and services has taken in terms of road deaths over the period 2010 to 2018. It examines the performance of individual countries, as well as the European Union as a whole, in tackling the risks, and describes some of the policies needed to reduce deaths and serious injuries in the future.

NACTO/GDCI – Streets for Pandemic Response & Recovery, May 2020

A new NACTO resource on emerging street practices for pandemic response and recovery was developed through a collaboration between NACTO, the NACTO Global Designing Cities Initiative, Bloomberg Associates, Street Plans, and Sam Schwartz. This resource aggregates and synthesizes emerging practices in transportation and street design in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights cities’ current efforts to re-organize streets to best manage this crisis and support economic recovery. This new resource will be revised and expanded regularly as more data becomes available on what approaches are the most successful at meeting city goals.

Levitate Newsletter – Societal Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles, May 2020

The newsletter May 2020 of the Horizon 2020 project Levitate (Societal Level Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles) was recently released highlighting the relation of automated vehicles and COVID-19. It presents an interview with Helmut Augustin, City of Vienna, and the first LEVITATE webinar on the impacts of automation in freight transport. The newsletter also highlights the upcoming 2nd webinar on the impacts of automation in urban transport on 11 June 2020.

A critical overview of driver recording tools, 2020

A paper titled “A critical overview of driver recording tools” authored by Apostolis Ziakopoulos, Dimitris Tselentis, Armira Kontaxi and George Yannis, is now published in Journal of Safety Research. The objective of this review paper is to present and comparatively assess the various driver recording tools that researchers have at their disposal. A critical synthesis of the results was conducted, providing the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing each tool and including additional knowledge regarding ease of experimental implementation, data handling issues, impacts on subsequent analyses, as well as the respective cost parameters. New technologies provide undeniably powerful tools that allow for seamless data handling, storage, and analysis, such as smartphones and in-vehicle data recorders. However, this sometimes comes at considerable costs (which may or may not pay off at a later stage), while legacy driver recording methods still have their own niches to fill in research.

City of Athens – The Great Walk Traffic Arrangements, May 2020

The new emblematic sustainable urban mobility arrangements within the Athens Great Walk project were presented by NTUA Professor George Yannis at the Athens City Council on May 11, 2020, which unanimously accepted the breakthrough and brave choices of Mayor Kostas Bakoyannis for extended regain of urban public space, public transport in priority, and safe and efficient mobility of pedestrians and cyclists.

LEVITATE – Webinar: The impacts of automation in urban transport – featuring local urban strategies, June 2020

The Horizon 2020 project Levitate (Societal Level Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles) is organising the 2nd webinar on the impacts of automation in urban transport – featuring local urban strategies on 11 June, 2020 (10:00-11:30 CET). This webinar will give an insight into the challenges that Urban mobility is facing due to the COVID-19 crisis and into local mobility strategies for longer terms adapted to the new normal. There will be presentations from LEVITATE partners: National Technical University of Athens, Transport for Greater Manchester, and an additional city representative (tbc).

BE OPEN – 2nd Newsletter, May 2020

The 2nd Newsletter of the Horizon 2020 project BeOpen (European forum and observatory for open science in transport) was recently released highlighting the results of the second project meeting (Piraeus, February 2020), the EOSC Symposium results and the EC President’s speech mentioning the importance of the European Open Science Cloud.

Sign up here:

European Commission – Study on Safety Feasibility of Retrofitting Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, April 2020

The European Commission has recently published the “Study on the feasibility, costs and benefits of retrofitting advanced driver assistance to improve road safety”, prepared by VTT and Ecorys. This study examined the technical feasibility of various retrofit ADAS systems (voluntarily or mandatory installable) while demonstrated the potential safety impacts of retrofitting the vehicle fleet and presented a cost-benefit assessment for the measures. Detection and warning of pedestrians and cyclists nearby the front or side of the vehicle proved having the highest benefit-cost ratio, as addressing the Vulnerable Road Users safety, being the key current road safety problem.

WHO – European Regional Status Report on Road Safety, April 2020

The World Health Organisation (WHO) published recently the “European Regional Status Report on Road Safety 2019” with the active contribution of NTUA. The European Regional Status Report on Road Safety describes the progress made by Governments in the Region. This Report demonstrates that over 221 people are killed on roads every day in the WHO European Region while thousands more are injured or disabled, with long-lasting effects. People from the eastern part of our Region bear the highest burden of road-traffic mortality and morbidity.

Audrey Testaferrata de Noto defended her PhD Thesis on Driver Perception-Reaction Times in Level 3 Automated Vehicles, 2020

Audrey Testaferrata de Noto has successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled: Driver Perception-Reaction Times in Level 3 Automated Vehicles. This PhD thesis was carried out at the Faculty for the Build Environment of the University of Malta under the supervision of NTUA Prof. George Yannis. The scope of the research was to establish the Perception-Reaction Time (PRT) of drivers in a simulated Level 3 vehicle and to examine the interdependency between the person-specific characteristics in relation to different scenarios featuring different in-vehicle distractions and different type of alerts and subsequently to compare these values with those of standard specifications used in road design in different countries for the calculation of Stopping Sight Distances (SSD). The results gave an average perception-reaction time of 4.23 seconds and showed that the younger age groups have lower PRTs for all scenarios than their older counterparts.

9th International Conference Road Safety in Local Community, Banja Luka, October 2020

Every year Republic of Srpska (Bosnia and Herzegovina), loses many valuable human lives and incurs enormous economic costs caused by road accidents. The Traffic Safety Agency of Republic of Srpska in cooperation with the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) are organizing the 9th International Conference Road Safety in Local Community, which will take place in Banja Luka, Republic of Srpska on 29-30 October 2020 aiming to constantly strengthen and develop capacities at the local level and create groups of road safety experts who will have enough enthusiasm, courage and will to fight with this problem facing the country. Title and abstract submission: 24 May 2020

Transport Research Arena (TRA), Helsinki, 2020

The Transport Research Arena Conference (TRA 2020) organised by the European Commisison and the European transport research platforms (ACARE, ALICE, CEDR, ECTP, ERRAC, ERTRAC, ETRA, Waterborne), was scheduled to take place in Helsinki, Finland from 26-30th April 2020, themed “Rethinking transport – towards clean and inclusive mobility”. The conference was cancelled, though, due to the corona virus crisis. Nevertheless, all scientific papers are scheduled to be published at the Conference Proceedings. NTUA’s TRA conference papers (full paper + presentation) are listed below:

An exploration of European road users’ safety attitudes towards speeding, 2019

A paper titled “An exploration of European road users’ safety attitudes towards speeding” authored by Alexandra Laiou, Athanasios Theofilatos, George Yannis, Uta Meesmann and Katrien Torfs is now published in Journal of Transportation Safety & Security. The objective of this paper is to analyse attitudes and opinions of Europeans on speeding and compare them amongst countries based on demographic characteristics as well as to provide a number of recommendations to be used in the effort to reduce speeding and improve road safety. All reported attitudes depend strongly on participants’ gender and age. The majority of people who accept driving over the speed limit do not believe that speed limits are set at acceptable levels.

HADI – International Road Safety Virtual Conference, May 2020

The Hellenic Association of Driving Instructors together with Key Transportation Organisations in Greece are organising an International Multidisciplinary Traffic Safety Virtual Conference on 29-30 May 2020. The Conference aims concern the evaluation of traffic and road safety in Greece, the identification of current and future pedestrians and vehicles traffic problems in Greece related to new technologies, the exchange of experiences from scientific studies, and current traffic safety actions and practices in Greece and internationally. The online program of the Conference is available:

Drive2theFuture – 1st Newsletter, April 2020

The 1st newsletter of the Horizon 2020 project Drive2theFuture (Needs, wants and behaviour of drivers and automated vehicle users today and into the future) was recently released highlighting the 1st Drive2theFuture Workshop (Brussels, March 2020), together with the Autonomous Vehicles consumer survey and the results from the three Plenary Meetings which took place so far. The 1st Newsletter highlights also the 12 pilots of the project and makes a reference to the three Horizon 2020 projects which focus also on driver behaviour and acceptance of connected, cooperative and automated transport. Sign up here.

ONISR/Cerema – Great safety impact from the new 80 km/h speed limit on rural single carriageways in France, 2020

In France since July 1, 2018, the speed limit on all two-way roads, without a central separator, outside urban areas was reduced from 90 km/h to 80 km/h. The French Road Safety Observatory (ONISR) and Cerema published recently a provisional 18-months evaluation in which it was demonstrated that over the year 2019, compared to the reference average for 2013-2017, 211 lives were saved on the network outside built-up areas outside motorways, while at the same time 44 more lives were lost in built-up areas.

GRSP/ VIAS – Towards the 12 voluntary global targets for road safety, January 2020

Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP) in collaboration with the VIAS Institute recently published the Manual on “Towards the 12 voluntary global targets for road safety”, providing guidance for countries on activities and measures to achieve the voluntary global road safety performance targets. It spells out what type of activities need to be undertaken, what data sources can be used and how performance can be measured and presented. It defines each target and points out what actions need to be taken and how each target can be measured.

Levitate – Webinar: the future impacts of automation in freight transport, March 2020

The Horizon 2020 project Levitate (Societal Level Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles) organised a webinar on the future impacts of automation in freight transport on 23 April 2020, 10:00-11:30 CET. This webinar gave an insight on autonomous solutions in freight, as well as their future impacts and potentials in the transport sector. It was presented an introduction of LEVITATE and its use case on freight transport, the project ALEES from VIL (Platform for the logistics sector in Flanders) and an overview of ALICE on Autonomous Freight Transport Potentials.

IRF/ERF/ASECAP – Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility Virtual Workshop, April 2020

International Road Federation (IRF) – Geneva in collaboration with the European Union Road Federation (ERF) and the European Association of Tollway Operators (ASECAP) organised the IRF Virtual Workshop on “Unleashing road infrastructure potential for Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM)”, on 23 April 2020. This workshop session provided insights into the role, the vision and challenges of the road infrastructure sector in this transition period towards Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM). With an average audience of 200 international participants, 12 speakers from different backgrounds described how road infrastructure stakeholders will contribute to the new mobility ecosystem stressing the importance of mutual understanding and collaboration with other sectors.