Ethos Events in collaboration with the financial and business portal banks.com.gr and the magazine CHRIMA are organizing for the second consecutive year the 2nd Auto Forum titled: “Change your car!”. The conference took place with great success on 7 November 2018 in Athens. The subject of the 2nd Auto Forum was the latest technological advances in the field of passive safety in the automotive sector and the need for consumers to understand the potential of the new technology in order to “escape” untouchable or at least slightly injured after a violent collision caused by a traffic accident. 

A paper titled “Which factors affect accident probability at unexpected incidents? A structural equation model approach” authored by Panagiotis Papantoniou, Constantinos Antoniou, George Yannis and Dimosthenis Pavlou is now published in Journal of Transportation Safety & Security. A driving simulator experiment was carried out, in which 95 participants were asked to drive under different types of distraction (no distraction, conversation with passenger, cell phone use) in different road and traffic conditions. Then, in the framework of the statistical analysis, driving performance is estimated as a new unobserved (latent) variable based on several individual driving simulator parameters while a structural equation model is developed investigating which factors lead to increased accident probability at unexpected incidents. Regarding driver distraction, results indicate that cell phone use has a negative effect on accident risk confirming the initial hypothesis that when talking on the cell phone drivers find it difficult to handle an unexpected incident and as a result are more likely to commit an accident. 

The American College of Greece – Institute of Public Health is organizing a workshop on “Road Accidents and Safe Traffic Behaviour: Are they prevented or are they just cured?”, which will take place on 14 November 2018 in Athens, Greece. Key note speaker will be Prof. George Yannis. 

Under the theme “Smart Mobility, Empowering Cities“, 26^th Intelligent Transport Systems World Congress, the world’s leading transport technology congress, will arrive at the shores of Singapore from 21 – 25 October 2019, organized by Land Transport Authority (LTA), Intelligent Transportation Society (ITS) and co-hosted by ERTICO – ITS Europe together with ITS America,  ITS Asia. With a comprehensive format of plenary and interactive sessions, as well as a dynamic exhibition with technical demonstrations and tours, the World Congress 2019 will be an opportunity for our sponsors and partners to network, discuss and share ground-breaking transport technology, and forge mutually beneficial partnerships to further unleash the power of ITS.  

ERTICO – ITS Europe is organizing, in partnership with the European Commission and will be hosted by the Municipality of Eindhoven and Municipality of Helmond, the 13th ITS European Congress, which will be held in Eindhoven, on 3-6 June 2019. The ITS Congress in Europe, is the largest event entirely dedicated to smart mobility and digitalisation of transport. 

The National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) is organizing the Road Safety & Simulation International Conference 2019 (RSS2019) which will be held on 14-17 October 2019 in Iowa City, Iowa, USA. The conference theme focuses on Transformations in Transportation, and conference topics include, but are not limited to: Automated Vehicles Technology, Connected Vehicles Technology, Vulnerable Road Users, Roadway Infrastructure Design, and Distributed Simulation Technology. 

The International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD) of the International Transport Forum (ITF) organised a Meeting in Belgrade, Serbia, on 17-18 October 2018, in which the latest international road safety developments were discussed.  NTUA contributed actively with 3 presentations:

• Comparing the safety culture in Norway and Greece
• Update on the SaferAfrica project
• National road accident statistics: worldwide practices for personal data protection

The Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety-Queensland (CARRS-Q) is organizing the 8^th International Cycling Safety Conference (ICSC2019) which is going to be held in Brisbane, Australia, on 18-20 November 2019. The ICSC is a forum for researchers and experts in the field of cycling safety to exchange their knowledge and bring up new research topics or safety solutions. The conference facilitates interaction between participants and offers a premium forum to share scientific results and ideas, and favours networking in the cycling safety community. 

The UN Road Safety Collaboration is organizing the global campaign for the Fifth UN Global Road Safety Week, 6-12 May 2019, under the theme “leadership for road safety”. Enlightened leaders are able to provide a vision of what the future might look like and to mobilize action to achieve this. The goal of the Week, which will be held from 6-12 May 2019, is to generate a demand from the public for stronger leadership for road safety worldwide. Its objectives are to provide an opportunity for civil society to generate demands for strong leadership for road safety, especially around concrete, evidence-based interventions which will save lives and to inspire leaders to take action by showcasing examples of strong leadership for road safety within governments, international agencies, NGOs, foundations, schools and universities, and private companies, among others. 

The Emirati Traffic Safety Society (ETSS) along with the Arab Road Safety Organization (AROSO), La Prevention Routière Internationale (PRI) and the International Road Federation (Geneva, Switzerland) co-organized an International Conference on: “Safer Roads & Mobility” which was held with great success in Abu Dhabi, UAE, on 24 – 25th, October, 2018. The conference program focused specifically on Pillar II “Safer Roads and Mobility” of the Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011-2020) due to its sensitive impact on reducing road traffic fatalities.  

The 31st ICTCT conference was held with great success in Porto, Portugal on 25-26th October 2018, under the main topic “On the track of future urban mobility: safety, human factors and technology”. The conference was organised in close co-operation with the Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal. The objective of the conference was to support the understanding of future trends in urban mobility and their implications for the safety of all road users. 

The European Union Road Federation (ERF) together with IRF Global and the support of NTUA, organised the European Road Conference “Corridors for Shared Prosperity”, which took place with great success in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on 22-24 October 2018. This conference offered an essential platform to deepen the understanding of these challenges, widen the engagement framework with regional road stakeholders, and achieve consensus on key policy, investment and planning measures. 

The Association for European Transport organised the 46th European Transport Conference, which took place with great success in Dublin, Ireland, on 10-12 October, 2018.  The European Transport Conference (ETC) is the annual conference of the Association for European Transport. Each year the conference presents the opportunity to interact with a range of speakers across the Transport Industry, including several Road Safety Topics. The range of topics, the multi-seminar approach and the networking environment makes ETC unique among transport conferences, making it the established premier event of its type. 

The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims is observed on the third Sunday of November each year (this year on 18 November 2018) by an increasing number of countries on every continent around the world. From 1995, the European Federation of Road Traffic Victims (FEVR) observed this day, as European Day of Remembrance, that was adopted by the United Nations in 2005, and is dedicated to remembering the many millions killed or injured in road crashes and their families and communities, as well as to pay tribute to the dedicated emergency crews, police and medical professionals who daily deal with the traumatic aftermath of road death and injury. The Alliance’s social campaign for World Day of Remembrance 2018 includes both global and local elements.  

The 5th International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS) will take place in Heraklion, Crete, on 3-5 May 2019. The purpose of VEHITS 2019 is to bring together engineers, researchers and practitioners interested in the advances and applications in the field of Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems. This conference focuses on innovative applications, tools and platforms in all technology areas such as signal processing, wireless communications, informatics and electronics, related to different kinds of vehicles, including cars, off-road vehicles, trains, ships, underwater vehicles, or flying machines, and the intelligent transportation systems that connect and manage large numbers of vehicles, not only in the context of smart cities but in many other application domains. 

Dimitris Tselentis has successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled: Benchmarking Driving Efficiency using Data Science Techniques applied on Large-Scale Smartphone Data. This PhD thesis was carried out at the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering at the School of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens under the supervision of Prof. George Yannis. The main objective of this PhD is to provide a methodological approach for driving safety efficiency benchmarking on a trip and driver basis using data science techniques. It also investigates the way to achieve this by defining a safety efficiency index based on travel and driving behaviour metrics collected from smartphone devices. Furthermore, the present doctoral research proposes a methodological framework for identifying the least efficient trips in a database and for estimating the efficient level of metrics that each non-efficient trip should reach to become efficient. Finally, this dissertation’s objective is to study the temporal evolution of driving efficiency and identify the main driving patterns and profiles of the driver groups formed.  

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) organized the 7th International Conference Road Safety in Local Community, which took place with great success 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 road safety experts who will have enough enthusiasm, courage and will to fight with this problem facing the country.  

The 6th International Conference on Driver Distraction and Inattention (DDI2018) was held with great success in Gothenburg, Sweden, during October 15-17, 2018. Nearly 190 delegates from 26 countries attended DDI2018  which is a record number of delegates. The conference was hosted and co-organised by the SAFER Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre at Chalmers in Sweden, the French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks (IFSTTAR), and the Australian Road Research Group (ARRB). The conference’s theme was “Driver engagement during assisted driving” and a majority of the research results gave new valuable knowledge about how self-propelled vehicles should be designed to enable drivers to handle them. 

 

Since 54 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. Over the past years, the WRS have proved to be an invaluable and internationally accepted reference tool for governments, NGOs, investments banks, research institutes and anyone analyzing and reporting trends in key subject areas like traffic volumes and vehicle usage, road expenditure, road safety, energy consumption and emissions. This year, the WRS 2018 (data 2011-2016) features more than 205 countries, with data on over 45 road related topics, presented in nine substantive sections, with the active contribution of NTUA for the Greek data. 

The 8th conference of European Association for Research in Transportation (hEART) will take place in Budapest on 4-6 September 2019. The conference is organized by the Faculty of Transportation Engineering and Vehicle Engineering at Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), and will cover relevant areas of transportation research with specific focus on methods, models and planning of transport systems. The aim of the conference is to connect researchers in transport modeling, transport economics and transport policy with advanced practice. Bringing together leading experts and promising young researchers, the symposium offers an opportunity for scientific discussion and interaction in relatively small groups. The conference will be accompanied by social events, and a summer school intended for PhD students the day before the symposium. 

The Horizons 2020 research project InDev (In-depth Understanding of Accident Causation for Vulnerable Road Users) recently published a handbook with focus on vulnerable road users entitled: How to analyse accident causation? This handbook was developed to help road safety professionals diagnose road safety problems by gaining more insights into the mistakes by road users that lead to collision. It describes various road safety methods that can be applied for studying the safety of vulnerable (and other) road users, including: accident data analysis, conflict and behavioural observations, self-reporting and naturalistic studies and road safety audit and inspection.  

The 2018 Polis Conference on “Transport innovation for sustainable cities and regions” will take place on 22 and 23 November 2018, in Manchester, UK, organised by POLIS, the European Cities Network. The conference will provide an opportunity for cities, metropolitan areas and regions to showcase their transport achievements to a large audience, and for the wider transport community to engage with representatives of local and regional authorities on innovative transport solutions. Road Safety is one of the key areas of the Conference, as is also the subject of the special joint POLIS–ITF workshop titled: From Safety Data to Safer City Streets. 

The United Nations Road Safety Trust Fund which launched in April 2018, took an important step towards becoming operational, with the first meetings of its Advisory Board and Steering Committee taking place in Geneva. The Trust Fund aims to catalyze efforts to address the critical global road safety situation by bridging the gaps in the mobilization of resources and ensuring the effective coordination of action at all levels. 

The Directorate General for Mobility and Transport (DG Move) of the European Commission released the Statistical Pocketbook 2018 ‘EU Transport in figures‘. In this Statistical Pocketbook, key road safety Tables are contained, together with several other Tables on transport statistics, providing a complete picture of current trends in transport in Europe. Data on road fatalities for the EU member states and associate countries allow for time series comparisons and country rankings.  

EU Transport Commissioner Violeta Bulc recently announced the appointment of Matthew Baldwin as European Coordinator for Road Safety to help drive forward the new road safety strategy as set out under the key actions in the Commission’s third Mobility Package to modernise Europe’s transport system in May 2018. The role will involve the coordination of road safety efforts with Member States, the European Parliament, cities, regions and all stakeholders in the road safety community.    Matthew Baldwin gave an exclusive interview to the NTUA Road Safety Observatory:

NRSO: Matthew, tell me a bit about this new role of the European Coordinator for the promotion of road safety in Europe and what will be your specific areas of focus?

MB: First, thanks for this opportunity to set out what this role is all about and how I see it as fitting into our road safety “architecture”. It stems from the European Commission’s proposals last May for a new common framework for road safety and a strategic road safety action plan for Europe. We felt we needed someone to promote and coordinate this work at the European level, to give the proposals a push with Member States, with NGOs, with industry – and with vital academic bodies such as the NTUA! Luckily for me, Commissioner Bulc asked me to do it as part of my responsibilities as Deputy Director General here at DG MOVE, and to focus in particular on how we can deliver the results, how we can get back on the downward curve for deaths. Your readers will probably know, but we managed to reduce deaths by more than 50% in the first 15 years of this decade, but in the last few years, this has flattened out and we are currently going to miss the targets for 2010-20.

MB: So we need, as Commissioner Bulc puts it, a paradigm shift. Connected, cooperative, automated, autonomous mobility will ultimately deliver huge benefits – but for many years to come, probably for most of the next two decades, we will need to rely on implementing the Safe System as humans will continue to make mistakes, and we need to do everything we can to stop people dying or being seriously injured by those mistakes.

MB: There’s certainly a lot going on at national, regional, city level, reflecting the diversity of road safety performance across the EU, and we certainly don’t want to try to push a top down, one size fits all, model. What we are proposing is to widen the scope beyond the classic TEN-T roads to include the next level down, the national or primary roads, and where around 40% of the deaths occur. We also want Member States to take the needs of Vulnerable Road Users systematically into account in their infrastructure planning. The other big piece of legislation where our friends in DG GROW have taken the lead would add 16 new features to EU wide vehicle safety standards, such as intelligent speed assistance, automated braking, for all EU vehicle categories and models. I can’t stress enough how important these proposals could be – our detailed assessment suggests that they could together reduce deaths by more than 10 000 over the next decade, and serious injuries by more than 60 000 – and this is on top of the thousands and thousands of lives that existing legislation has saved. That’s just an illustration – I hope your readers will have a look at our proposals and give us feedback on how we can best implement a new European Road Safety Strategy.

MB: And as to my own role, well I’m still in my first month in the new job, so I am talking to everyone about everything, but I intend to approach it with all the energy I can muster. I am still looking for new ideas, so please follow me on Twitter on @BaldwinMatthew_ and tell me what YOU think needs to be done.

NRSO: Let me ask you about another aspect of the Commission proposals – these Road Safety Key Performance Indicators – how will these work to deliver the EU road safety strategy?

MB: Good question. The need for Road Safety KPIs goes back to the targets. Once again, we are aiming to get to Vision Zero – no road deaths – by 2050. Road safety is an epidemic – and if we can eliminate other epidemics like cholera and smallpox from the EU, no reason not to do the same for road safety. Obviously, with such an ambitious goal, you need to tackle it in chunks and set intermediate targets. It sounds obvious but targets are really really important if we want to get results. Some people argue that targets are dangerous – that if we miss them, we decredibilise the ultimate goals, make people give up. I disagree – we must keep road safety in the public mind, keep our politicians focused on it, as only that way will we get the investment, the people, to work on it.

MB: That is why it is so important that we have at EU level targets to go once again for a 50% reduction target in deaths, and this time also for serious injuries. But – and this is the key point – targets on their own won’t deliver results. We need to apply what we know works, from the massive research that has been done for so many years into the cause of road deaths and injuries, and agree together with the Member States where to put our energies.

MB: And that’s where the Road Safety KPIs come in – to take different elements of the Safe System like seat belt use where we KNOW that improved performance will deliver better results and to eventually identify a subsidiary target. So I hope we will agree on KPIs for protective equipment like seat belts, for use of the safest vehicles, for safe infrastructure, for emergency care, and so on. It’s difficult work as of course the road safety landscape is not the same across Europe. Just take speed, for example, where we have very different limits in different parts of Europe, and different cultures of respect for those limits, enforcement and so on. So we would like to start simply by identifying how much respect there is for existing limits and then later try something more sophisticated that would enable us to measure, and target improvements in, safe speed that takes account of infrastructure, weather conditions and so on. But the bottom line is that we get agreed baselines, common measurement methodology, and link the indicators to the overall outcome targets. Getting the data together is hard, but really important.

NRSO: How you envisage to convince transport / mobility authorities and stakeholders to put road safety higher on their agenda?

MB: Well that’s a leading question ! it would be wrong to suggest that Member States, regions, cities, aren’t already doing their best. But it is also true that resources are so limited now in the public sector, and road safety doesn’t seem to be one of the glamorous topics ! There’s also the strange phenomonen which of course applies globally, namely that we appear to ACCEPT so many deaths – 1.3 million globally, 25,000 a year here in Europe, which of course makes us a success story, relatively speaking. So we need to “stop accepting” this, and I think Commissioner Bulc has done a great job in pushing transport ministers and others not to accept this silent killer. We wouldn’t accept anything like that number of fatalities in other forms of transport or indeed our daily lives, and we shouldn’t accept it for road safety either. Much more prosaically, I want to promote this important Safe System concept of shared responsibility, which applies at all sorts of different levels. We all share responsibility for road deaths and injuries – the road user and other road users, public authorities, the police, car companies, health care systems – and we need a very active, cooperative, holistic approach. We are certainly not into the blame game here, and while of course Member States must take responsibility for what goes on in their countries, there is so much more we can do than naming and shaming – we can learn from each other and promote best practice, such as in putting together national road safety action plans. Put simply, if we can make road safety more of a political priority, more of a collectively shared endeavour, we can develop a virtuous circle to promote change – and get us back on the downward curve of deaths and serious injuries.

MB: The other crucial thing is funding because that is a vital lever to support road safety. We will encourage the use of EU financial support from European structural and investment funds for infrastructure upgrades, for example. I am glad that there are a good number of applications in response to the Connecting Europe Facility’s latest call which expires[d] [this month] [in October] because as Slovakia for instance has shown, some cleverly deployed but even limited funds can go a long way in improving infrastructure. But what we are working towards, what we would most like to see is a flexible, one stop shop for access to different forms of EU funding, whether it is for infrastructure, training, enforcement, so watch this space !

NRSO: What is the link to sustainable mobility in your job title ?

MB: Two things. First and foremost, it is because the statistics show that Vulnerable Road Users (motorcyclists, cyclists, pedestrians) are taking a much bigger share of the casualties. I am told, for instance, that 90% of casualties in Sweden are now VRUs, i.e., those without the protection of a vehicle. We should be celebrating new forms of mobility, particularly active modes such as walkers and bikers, and it is unacceptable (to use that word again) that death and injury should be the result. So I want to work closely with cities in particular in existing forums such as CIVITAS to promote sustainable and safe mobility ! The other point of course is that connected, autonomous, driving etc is going to pose a lot of new challenges, especially in the course of the next two decades as new vehicles come onto our roads. Infrastructure performance requirements will change, eg for road signs. And very different levels of automated vehicle will have to co-exist with each other AND with fully human-driven vehicles for many years to come. As these new systems, such as Cooperative ITS which we are doing a lot to promote here in the EU, are introduced on our motorways, in our urban areas, I want to work with Member States and cities on how best to do this, and how to ensure safety is always to the forefront of decision making.

NRSO: What are your immediate plans for the promotion of the EU road safety strategy?

MB: Again, there is a lot of work going on in the Commission and across the EU, and I should stress that I am not doing all of it or planning to ! I first want to talk to all member states, focusing first perhaps on those where the problem is greatest (we have a wide divergence in death rates) and really hear from them how we can best work together on this. We have a very good established committee which I chair, called the High Level Group, made up of directors from all the Member States responsible for road safety, and I want this group really to be the steering committee for the new strategy (for example, agreeing on the new KPIs). Time is very short if we are to get the new strategy in place for the start of the next decade – I hope we can have initial agreement to what KPIs we are going to deploy by summer 2019. It is also absolutely essential that we get the revised infrastructure directive and car safety regulations agreed before the current European Parliament comes to an end in May of next year. So we will be pushing these issues hard, and also working with UNECE to make sure that we can as far as possible translate and apply globally the safe standards agreed in Europe, particularly as we start to establish standards for automated driving.

MB: Once again, it is a big honor to be asked to work on these vital questions. I want to be a useful resource for Member States, and to work effectively in partnership with them – and all other players in the field. Thanks a lot for this opportunity !

The 7th Annual International Cycling Safety Conference, organised by Chalmers, TNO, SWOV, and TU Delft took place with great success in Barcelona, Spain, on 10-11 October 2018. The ICSC is a forum for researchers and experts in the field of cycling safety to exchange their knowledge and bring up new research topics or safety solutions. The conference facilitates interaction between participants and offers a premium forum to share scientific results and ideas, and favours networking in the cycling safety community. 

2018 NETS’ Strength in numbers Annual Conference took place in Frisco, Texas on October 10 & 11, 2018. The conference convenes each year to review the results of NETS’ annual Strength in numbers Fleet Safety Benchmark Report, as well as to hear about featured road safety case studies, new research, emerging issues, and projects that are underway. This year the conference include: keynote presentations by industry leaders, road safety case studies, new research & technology solutions, emerging issues, ongoing projects, 2017 STRENGTH IN NUMBERS® Fleet Safety Benchmark Report, opportunity to network with other road safety professionals. 

The Hellenic Institute of Transportation Engineers (HITE) and the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly co-organized the 7th pan-Hellenic Road Safety Conference, which was held with great success in Larissa, Greece on October 11-12, 2018. The main objectives of the Conference were to investigate and evaluate the level of road safety in Greece, as well as the efforts and innovations that are designed and implemented to improve road safety of drivers, vehicles and pedestrians in the Greek road network.     NTUA contributed actively with the following 12 presentations (full papers with review and presentation):

•   Overview of the SafetyCube project: Towards a European Road Safety Decision Support System
•   SafeFITS: A Global Road Safety Model
•   The African Road Safety Observatory – African RSO
•   Safety culture among private and professional drivers: Norway and Greece
•   How is Older Drivers Safety enhanced by In-Vehicle Assistance Systems?
•   Exploration of real-time crash likelihood of Powered-Two Wheelers in Greece
•   Quantifying the Need for Driving Data Collection in Driving Behaviour Assessment Using Smartphone Data
•   Investigating average speed after an unexpected event through a driving simulator experiment
•   Analysis of the impact of autonomous vehicles to travel behaviour
•   Comparative analysis of young drivers behaviour in normal and simulated conditions in urban environment
•   The effect of socioeconomics and transportation conditions on road safety in the European Union
•   Critical driver behaviour and risk factors in Europe

The 2018 TISPOL Conference “Expanding our Horizons” organised by the European Traffic Police Network was held with great success on 9-10 October 2018, in Manchester. The 2018 theme was ‘Expanding our Horizons’ – giving the opportunity to discuss who are the right partners for long-term success in reducing death and serious injury on the roads of Europe. The participants had the opportunity to showcase a selection of innovative work in road safety enforcement, as well as presenting a special discussion and debate on the future direction for Project EDWARD, our ‘European Day Without A Road Death’. 

The final event of the three Horizon 2020 projects InDeV, PROSPECT and XCYCLE took place on October 12^th 2018 at Applus+ IDIADA, 70 km south of the city of Barcelona. At this one-day event, results of these three projects on traffic safety analysis and integrated approach towards better protection of vulnerable road users were presented. Participants also had the opportunity to see live demonstrations that were performed.