On the occasion of the opening of this year’s European Mobility Week, the European Commission and the Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety co-organised a Road Safety Roundtable in Brussels. During this event, a commitment was handed over to the NGOs from the European Commission and the EU Member States, namely the target of halving the number of fatalities and serious injuries on European roads between 2020 and 2030. The Global Alliance is collecting commitments around the world in the run-up to the Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in Stockholm in February 2020. 

As this year’s European Mobility Week starts, the European Commission and the Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety co-organised a Road Safety Roundtable in Brussels on 16 September. During this event, a commitment from European cities, coordinated by POLIS and Eurocities, entitled “The New Paradigm for Safe City Streets” was handled over including 10 principles to be recognized by the cities, as necessary for sound and effective action for traffic safety.  

Road deaths and serious injuries are not just unfortunate accidents. They are predictable, preventable, and unacceptable. Evidence shows that setting a road safety target is an effective way to reduce the number of people killed and seriously injured in traffic crashes. That is why the Towards Zero Foundation’s #50by30 campaign calls for a new target to halve road deaths and serious injuries in a new decade of SDG action for road safety to 2030. A new target and a new decade of action will help to save 675,000 lives a year, accelerate progress in global road injury prevention, and work towards a world eventually free from road fatalities and serious injuries.  

The UN General Assembly published a report on improving global road safety, prepared by the World Health Organization in consultation with the United Nations regional commissions and other partners of the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration. The report highlights that while the number of road traffic deaths has stabilized, as indicated in the Global Status Report on Road Safety 2018 , significant reductions have not been observed, and road traffic injuries are now the leading cause of death for children and young adults between the ages of 5 and 29 years. 

Boussias Communications is organizing the 2019 Connected Cars Conference which took place with great success in Athens on 18th September 2019. This conference covered issues related to the major future changes coming in the field of vehicles, fleet management and transport in general. Connected Cars Conference 2019 is set to serve as the platform for transferring the necessary know-how and information on the cutting-edge technologies that characterize the new vehicle era.  

Participate now at the driver telematics survey of the Horizons 2020 research project i-Dreams. The i-Dreams project develops a highly innovative driver monitoring system that will provide interventions to keep drivers within a safe driving zone, applicable in several transport modes: passenger cars, trucks, buses, trains, trams. You can submit your valuable contribution by filling-in the 15-minute online survey available at the following link. 

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NTUA Professor George Yannis gave a Lecture titled: Digital Road Safety at the Research and Innovation in Safe and Smart Mobility Seminar, a new initiative of Loughborough University. The Lecture took place with great success on Wednesday 11th September 2019 at Loughborough University. The aim of this initiative is to discuss on new multidisciplinary research programmes to tackle mobility challenges.  

The Lecture on Digital Road Safety focused on the new great potential of data from several digital sources to efficiently support both safe driver behaviour and road safety decision making at all levels. 

The Focus Area Mobility & Transportation Systems of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are organising the International Scientific Conference on Mobility and Transport (mobil.TUM 2019) which took place with great success on 11-12 September 2019, in Munich, Germany. The theme of the conference was Transportation Systems of the Future. Road safety was one of the key discussion areas enabling inspiration from the latest innovations and exploring new directions for shaping the future of urban mobility and safety.  NTUA actively contributed with the following presentations:

•   Shaping the mobility in university campuses throughout ICT solutions
•   How an unexpected event affects overall driving performance?

Since 55 years, the  International Road Federation (IRF) World Road Statistics (WRS) continue to be the major comprehensive, universal source of statistical data on road networks, traffic and inland transport, including traffic accidents. This year the WRS 2019 (data 2012-2017) features more than 205 countries, with data on over 45 road related topics, with the active contribution of NTUA for the Greek data. There is highest response rate in years, covering more countries than ever before and a brand new design and layout. 

The ICoRSI International Symposium on Safety of Vulnerable Road Users  will be co-sponsoring a Workshop on “Globalising Vision Zero: Generating Scientific Evidence for the Road Ahead” on 18th February 2020 in Stockholm (A Pre-Conference event on the occasion of the 3rd Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety).  At this event ICoRSI in association with Campbell Collaboration will present for discussion an Evidence and Gap Map for road safety interventions worldwide. This work will enable future research and discussions to be based on approaches and interventions which science shows can be effective in different parts of the world.  

Reducing the road safety performance gap between EU Member States and offering high levels of safety on all European roads is one of the most important objectives of the European Commission in the area of transport. The EU Road Safety Exchange project wants to help reduce this gap through the exchange of knowledge and experience on effective road safety measures. The project will develop partnerships between road safety professionals in different European countries and help address their specific road safety challenges through twinning activities. On 9 October 2019, a high level event in Brussels will mark the official launch of the project. 

The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) has published a short video explaining how alcohol interlock programmes in several European countries are helping to cut drink-driving. Ending drink-driving in the EU could prevent up to 5.000 deaths every year. 

ERTRAC in the framework of the FUTURE-RADAR project is organizing a workshop titled: Road Safety R&I Workshop: from Challenges to Solutions – the Way forward, which will take place in Brussels on 15 November 2019. What is the European Commission’s perception of the safety situation on European roads? What is European R&I contributing to make our roads safer? Which safety research is needed in the coming years to overcome the challenges ahead of us and cover remaining “white spots”? How can a good coverage of road safety R&I needs be ensured in Horizon Europe? These are just some of the questions that will be discussed at this Road Safety Workshop, organized by the Working Group Road Transport Safety & Security of ERTRAC, the European Road Transport Research Advisory Council. 

A paper titled “Driving difficulties as reported by older drivers with mild cognitive impairment and without neurological impairment” authored by Sophia Vardaki, Anne E. Dickerson, Ion Beratis, George Yannis and Sokratis G. Papageorgiou is now published in Traffic Injury Prevention. The purpose of this study was to explore the factors determining driving difficulties as seen from the viewpoint of 30 older drivers with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 30 age-matched controls without cognitive impairment. The analysis revealed that 2 factors underlie MCI perceptions of driving difficulties, representing (1) difficulties associated with late detection combined with slowed response to relevant targets in the peripheral field of view and (2) difficulties associated with divided attention between tasks requiring switching from automatic to conscious processing particularly of long duration. 

The Hellenic Institute of Transportation Engineers (HITE) in collaboration with the Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT/CERTH), organized a workshop entitled “Transport and Tourism” which took place with great success on Wednesday, September 4^th 2019, in Rhodes Island, under the auspices of the South Aegean Region. Through a dialogue between stakeholders of transport and tourism, the workshop aimed to present the current situation, to highlight problems as well as good practices, and to explore how the transport sector can be promoted in relation to tourism (and vice-versa), so that the Greek touristic destinations can provide safe and high standard transport services and infrastructures, also taking advantage of the technological developments in the field.  NTUA actively contributed with the following presentation:  Tourism and Road Accidents in Greece

The City of Edmonton’s Traffic Safety section organized the 22nd International Council on Alcohol, Drugs and Traffic Safety (ICADTS) Conference, which was held with great success in Edmonton, Canada, on 18-21 August 2019. This multi-disciplinary conference brought together experts from public health and road safety, traffic and transport psychology, public health, law, medicine, economics, law enforcement, public policy, education, pharmacology, toxicology, forensic science, human factors, and alcohol intervention and rehabilitation.  

The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) has published a Report titled “Road Safety Priorities for the EU 2020-2030: Briefing for the new European Parliament”. In June 2019, the Commission published a new Strategic Action Plan on Road Safety that includes a new long-term target to halve road deaths by 2030 as well as, for the first time, a target to reduce serious injuries by the same amount. The EU must implement this new policy framework so that it ensures both the highest practicable level of safety and a fair distribution of safety across the European Union. New legislative proposals on improving both infrastructure and vehicle safety are currently being finalised. Their further implementation and the development of new legislation in other areas will be in the hands of newly elected MEPs over the period 2019-2024.  

The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) has published a Report titled “Independence in Investigation of Transport Accidents”. The aim of this Report is to promote a set of principles for independence of transport accident investigation in Europe, under which the requirements for independent investigation could be met by the EU itself, by each Member State and by any other European country.   

The UK Department for Transport is organizing an International Road Safety Conference which will take place in London on 3-4 September 2019. The International Road Safety Conference will bring together Ministers, road safety experts and private sector representatives from across the globe. The two day event will focus on collaborative learning, with key topics to be discussed including Vision Zero, the Safe Systems Approach, and a focus on technology and innovation. 

The EU-funded EuroMed Transport Support Project (EuroMed) and World Health Organisation (WHO) released a joint Report titled: “Understanding and bridging the differences between country-reported and WHO-estimated road traffic fatality data“. It focuses on the considerable challenges in collecting complete, accurate and reliable road traffic fatality data that some countries worldwide are facing. Moreover, it attempts to explain the disparity between WHO estimates and country-reported data on road traffic fatality and provide suggestions on what steps countries can take to strengthen their data systems. 

Within the framework of the 3rd Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety, co-organised by the World Health Organisation and the Swedish Government and will take place on 19–20 February 2020 in Stockholm the Academic Expert Group of the Conference has compiled a set of recommendations for a road safety strategy for the period 2020-2030 and some preliminary conclusions on the Decade of Action for Road Safety and the 2030 Agenda. 

SaferAfrica Final Conference “Results and future perspectives for road safety in Africa” will take place in Tunis (Tunisia) on 18^th of September. Prominent international institutions, African regional and national bodies’ representatives, policymakers, researchers and civil society organizations will join the dialogue for a better road safety management throughout the Continent. The most innovative results of SaferAfrica Project are the African Road Safety Observatory and the African-European Dialogue Platform on Road Safety which has linked policymakers, donors and professionals engaged in road safety to plan and design road safety actions. 

A FEHRL Infrastructure Research Workshop took place with great success on 18 July 2019 in the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport in Athens, Greece. The key-note speech concerned: “On-Ramp to innovation: Let’s co-create together our future transport infrastructure“ and it coincides with the celebration of the 30^th anniversary of FEHRL. NTUA actively contributed with the following presentation:  Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering

Tongji University organized the “7th International Symposium on Transportation Safety” which took place with great success on 09-10 July 2019, in Shanghai. The Symposium focused on innovations promoting the development of traffic management methods and technologies, and brought together some of the world-leading experts in road safety and traffic modeling, who presented their work on the utilization of big data, cloud computing, statistical modeling, safety surrogate measures, and artificial intelligence. NTUA actively contributed with the following presentation:  Advanced Safety Modeling and Management Platform

A Diploma Thesis titled “Investigation of traffic and safety behaviour of pedestrians texting or web-surfing” was recently presented by Marilia Ropaka. The regression analyses developed in this research pointed out that in high pedestrian traffic, mobile use not only decreases pedestrians’ speed, regardless of their age, but also increases their probability of being involved in an accident with an oncoming vehicle. Results indicated that distraction caused by texting or web-surfing had a negative impact on pedestrians’ main traffic and safety characteristics.  

A Diploma Thesis titled “Impact of economic, social and transport indicators on serious road injuries in the European Union” was recently presented by Maria Charalampidi. Generalized Linear Models application lead to the conclusion that the percentage of passenger cars with EuroNcap scores 5 stars has the most important impact and its increase leads to serious road injuries decrease. Moreover, the increase of the percentage of buses leads to significant decrease not only to the number of serious road injuries but also to the severity of road accidents.  

NTUA Professor George Yannis made a synthesis presentation of road safety performance and respective measures in Greece, at the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) PIN Panel Meeting, on 20 June, 2019 in Brussels.  Greece has made the most impressive road safety improvement in the EU during the last decade (51% road fatalities decrease), with 690 fatalities in 2018: the best ever performance since 1965 and only 61 lives to be saved to reach the EU 2020 target. This is the combined result of the economic crisis and a series of important and systematic measures on road infrastructure, traffic safety legislation and safe road user behaviour campaigns.   Road Safety in Greece

AISICO s.r.l. and ERF are jointly organizing the International Conference on Road Safety for Motorcyclists that will take place at Pereto, Italy, on September 20, 2019. The objective of the Conference is to investigate the main issues related to motorcyclists road safety from different points of view and sensitize the industry experts about it. 

A paper titled “Analysis of driver behaviour through smartphone data: The case of mobile phone use while driving” authored by Eleonora Papadimitriou, Anastasia Argyropoulou, Dimitris Tselentis, and George Yannis is now published in Safety Science. The aim of this paper is to explore driving behaviour during mobile phone use on the basis of detailed driving analytics collected by smartphone sensors from OSeven Telematics. The data came from a sample of one hundred drivers (18,850 trips) during a naturalistic driving experiment over four months. The results suggest that mobile phone use while driving may be accurately predicted by the model in more than 70% of cases. 

Road Safety is acknowledged as a priority issue in the EuroMed partner countries (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia). However, the collection of credible road safety data is a major challenge. In this context, the recent EuroMed Report, which was launched with the active contribution of NTUA, consists of provision of technical assistance on setting up road safety reliable, harmonized and comparable data collection systems at the EuroMed Partner Countries and sharing at regional level. The Final Report concludes that the adoption of common definitions for road crash variables and values strongly depends on the successful implementation of basic definitions (accident, road, casualty severity) and the systematic and complete reporting of crashes and casualties.