The Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) recently released a Handbook titled “How to Implement Cycling Infrastructure“. This Handbook serves as a global resource, and features case studies from the 10 selected BICI cities and other inspiring global best practices, focusing on the full process of implementing cycling infrastructure. Furthermore, it provides resources and frameworks to help cities overcome the most common challenges and build support where they face significant pushback. 

A Paper titled “Road users’ safety attitudes towards speeding across 39 countries” authored by Dimitrios Nikolaou, Anna Marie Harkin, Thodoris Garefalakis, George Yannis and Fabian Surges has been published in Accident Analysis & Prevention. This Paper analyses speeding-related behaviours and safety attitudes using the ESRA3 survey, a harmonised international questionnaire administered across 39 countries in 2023. Self-reported speeding behaviours, acceptability beliefs, perceived social norms, risk perceptions, self-efficacy, and support for enforcement and policy measures were examined through descriptive analyses at the regional level and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with random intercepts capturing heterogeneity across all countries. The findings indicate that speeding is widely reported, with younger drivers and males consistently declaring higher speeding frequencies across road types. Driving too fast for road/traffic conditions is reported less often than exceeding limits in built-up areas. Furthermore, GLMM findings show that higher perceived personal/social acceptability is associated with higher self-reported speeding, whereas stronger intentions to comply and greater support for stricter enforcement are associated with lower speeding.  

CIVITAS organized with great success the CIVITAS Forum 2026 which took place in Thessaloniki, Greece on 15-17 September 2026, under the theme “Roots & Routes: Moving Forward to Competitive, Connected and Resilient Urban Mobility“. Since 2003, the CIVITAS Forum has been a dynamic Conference for smart, inclusive and sustainable urban mobility, welcoming city representatives, policymakers, practitioners, planners, academics and mobility enthusiasts from across Europe and beyond. Three umbrella topics were highlighted: competitive, connected and resilient mobility; covering areas such as public transport innovation, shared mobility and micromobility, Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM), active mobility, Vision Zero and safe streets for all.   NTUA actively contributed with the following presentation:

•  Benefits of the 30 km/h speed limit in cities

The Association for European Transport organized with great success the 54th European Transport Conference which took take place in Porto, Portugal on 9-11 September 2026. This Conference provided an excellent opportunity for sharing, learning, inspiring and network building, crossing all stages of transport planning from analyses to delivery and all transport modes.   NTUA actively contributed with the following paper and presentation:

•   Comparison of Manual and Automated Infrastructure Label Extraction for Harsh Event Prediction

A Paper titled “Improving risky driving behavior classification via conditional GAN-augmented hybrid machine learning models: a two-country naturalistic driving study” authored by Eleni Maria Theodoraki, Paraskevi Koliou and George Yannis has been published in European Transport Research Review. This Paper introduces a hybrid machine learning pipeline that combines Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) for creating realistic synthetic samples with robust classifiers. Furthermore, synthetic minority-class examples were generated with cGANs and combined with real training data. The analysis revealed that augmentation shifted feature importance distributions, reducing speed-metric dominance and increasing the relative importance of distance and physiological features, but whether these shifts reflect genuine generalisation improvements or synthetic data artefacts requires further validation. The results demonstrate how cGAN-based augmentation maintains minority-class detection performance under severe class imbalance while preserving interpretability through SHAP analysis, though further validation on independent driver populations is required before deployment in safety-critical contexts. 

A Paper titled “Network-Level Traffic and Safety Effects of Automated Vehicle Market Penetration Under Take-Over Events: A Microsimulation Study” authored by Marios Sekadakis, Dimitrios Nikolaou and George Yannis has been published in Future Transportation. This Paper investigates the network-level traffic and safety effects of increasing Market Penetration Rate (MPR) of SAE Level 2 and Level 3 automated vehicles under take-over conditions. Traffic performance was assessed through five network-level indicators (speed, delay, lane-changing frequency, travel time, and density). Safety was evaluated through 674 conflict events extracted via the Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM), using Time-to-Collision (TTC) as the primary indicator. MPR is the dominant feature of both dimensions. The findings show that Spearman correlations between MPR and the traffic indicators are very strong for speed, lane changes, travel time, and density, while delay time yields a weaker correlation reflecting its non-monotonic response. Furthermore, traffic costs of mixed-traffic automation appear at partial penetration, while network-level safety benefits remain limited and non-linear.  

A Paper titled “Comprehensive Assessment of Driver Takeover Readiness via a Multimodal Fusion Multi-Task Learning Model” has been published in Advanced Engineering Informatics authored by Hanwen Deng, Shuxiang Lin, Chaojie Fan, Xianhui Wu, Kui Wang, Yong Peng and George Yannis. This Paper constructs a multimodal takeover readiness dataset that incorporates visual, physiological, gaze, and demographic features. The dataset was collected from 32 participants using a within-subject design, yielding a total of 20,160 s of synchronized multimodal time-series data. Furthermore, post-trial self-reported questionnaire scores were used as the ground-truth labels for takeover readiness. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively fuses multimodal features and captures task-specific representations, achieving an average Accuracy of 79.0%, Balanced Accuracy of 78.5%, and Macro F1 score of 78.2% across five 5-class classification tasks, outperforming the selected baselines. These findings provide insights for the development of more precise and adaptive intervention strategies in future automated driving systems. 

A paper titled “Literature review of legal frameworks and liability allocation in connected and automated vehicles” authored by Julia Roussou, Apostolos Ziakopoulos, Armira Kontaxi and George Yannis has been published in Research in Transportation Business & Management. The objective of this Paper is to provide a comprehensive review of current literature in order to identify critical knowledge gaps especially in the design of robust legal frameworks and clarify the impacts of liability allocation regimes on CAVs adoption and operation. By addressing these issues, the paper aims to guide interested stakeholders such as, policymakers, researchers and industry leaders in shaping a transition to automated mobility that is not only safer and more efficient, but is also supported by clear, effective, and trustworthy legal frameworks. 

A paper titled “Evaluating Risky Driving Behavior Using a Naturalistic Driving Dataset: A Hybrid Modelling Approach” authored by Elena Maria Theodoraki, Thodoris Garefalakis, Eva Michelaraki and George Yannis has been published in Infrastructures. This Paper develops and evaluates three hybrid machine learning models: (i) Deep Neural Network–Random Forest (DNN-RF), (ii) Convolutional Neural Network–Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM), and (iii) Recurrent Neural Network–AdaBoost (RNN-AdaBoost), to classify risky driving behavior into three safety levels using naturalistic driving data from Belgium and the UK. The dataset includes 69 drivers, 15,389 trips, and 265,512 min of driving data. Furthermore, feature importance analysis identified harsh acceleration and braking as the most critical factors in Belgium, while total trip distance and harsh acceleration were predominant in the UK. The findings support the potential of hybrid deep learning models in improving road safety by accurately detecting risky driving behaviors. These insights can inform targeted interventions and driver assistance technologies to mitigate crash risks and promote safer driving practices.  

A paper titled “Implementation of an integrated model for understanding the impact of task complexity and coping capacity on crash risk” authored by Eva Michelaraki and George Yannis has been published in Accident Analysis & Prevention. This Study aims to identify the interaction of road, vehicle and driver-related factors to the estimation of task complexity, coping capacity and risk. To this end, data from a naturalistic driving experiment involving 135 drivers and 31,954 trips collected over a four-month period were analysed across experimental phases incorporating real-time and post-trip interventions. The results showed that environmental factors, including time of day, weather, distance and duration, were positively associated with task complexity and increased crash risk. Driver-related and vehicle-related state factors influenced coping capacity, which was generally negatively associated with risk. Overall, the Paper highlights the potential of data-driven interventions to improve road safety and support more effective driver assistance systems.  

Highly excited with our new NRSO highly interactive road safety dashboards open to all, fully visualising a wide range of recent and long-standing road crash statistics, risk exposure, safety performance indicators, self-reported behaviour and other road safety data, for the European Union, Greece and Worldwide; collected, processed and analysed continuously by the dream team of the NTUA Road Safety Observatory (NRSO) together with our large network of international cooperations. For more than two decades we make publicly available a wealth of reliable and comprehensive data to support evidence based decision making at all levels and promote safer roads everywhere and for all.  

The Horizon Europe research project IMPROVA (Injury Mitigation to Promote Vision-Zero Achievement) has recently released its 4th Newsletter, focusing on enhancing road safety by addressing the complexities of long-term consequences (LTC) caused by road traffic crashes. This version of the Newsletter mainly focuses on the three IMPROVA papers published in Traffic Injury Prevention, as well as the Project’s presence on the upcoming IRCOBI 2026 Conference in Munich. Furthermore, IMPROVA is updating the Functional Capacity Index (FCI), a long-standing reference tool in trauma research and road safety, to better reflect modern injury patterns and clinical insight. Participation to the survey is available here.

The International Road Federation (IRF) released the 63rd edition of the IRF World Road Statistics 2026 (WRS2026), with data open to all for free through the IRF WRS Data Warehouse platform, thanks to the generous support of the TotalEnergies Foundation and Michelin Corporate Foundation. The IRF WRS 2026 continues to be the major comprehensive, universal source of statistical data on road networks, traffic and inland transport, including traffic crashes. This year the WRS 2026 includes the latest data covering years 2019 to 2024, with the active contribution of NTUA for the Greek data. It includes over 200 road and transport-sector related indicators across 11 sections, covering more than 200 countries and territories.

The United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) organized with great success a two-day High-Level Meeting on Improving Global Road Safety which was held in New York, on 20-21 July 2026, under the theme “Scaling up and accelerating implementation of commitments to halving road traffic deaths and injuries by 2030“. In this context, the 104th UN General Assembly has adopted the “Progress Declaration on Global Road Safety“, reaffirming the global target of reducing road traffic deaths and injuries by at least 50% by 2030. Furthermore, Governments committed to undertake various actions, such as establishing or designating a national lead agency or equivalent entity to coordinate road safety across government. The Declaration also highlighted the need to ensure that public road transport systems, including bus rapid transit and similar systems, are the safest road transport mode, being also affordable, accessible and inclusive, including for children, older persons and persons with disabilities.  

The European Commission, in line with the EU’s General Safety Regulation, recently announced new mandatory life-saving systems for all new passenger cars and vans registered across the EU, starting on 7 July 2026. These new systems include an advanced emergency brake detecting pedestrians and cyclists, a driver distraction warning system, better forward vision, new tests for worn tyres, and an expanded safety glass area to protect pedestrians in accidents. These requirements support the EU’s long-term Vision Zero goal of near-zero road fatalities by 2050, while helping to better protect vulnerable road users and encourage wider adoption of advanced driver-assistance systems.  

The Directorate General for Mobility and Transport (DG Move) of the European Commission recently published its implementation strategy for its Directives to modernize EU rules on driving licences and driving disqualifications with the active contribution of NTUA. These initiatives aim to increase road safety across the EU, reducing the number of road deaths as well as undue administrative burden on citizens and authorities. The measures include an EU-wide accompanied driving scheme for 17-year-old drivers, a probationary period for novice drivers, and more systematic checks of people’s fitness to drive. The new rules also adjust training and testing requirements and set out key steps for the introduction of mobile EU driving licences and the EU-wide recognition of driving disqualifications, ensuring drivers who commit serious offences are held accountable across the EU.  

The European Road Safety Charter of the European Commission has announced the finalists for its Excellence in Road Safety Awards 2026, as a part of the EU Road Safety Conference which will take place on 23 November 2026 in Brussels, recognizing inspiring initiatives from Charter members across Europe that advance road safety through smart infrastructure, real-time data, immersive training and child-friendly streets. Fifteen finalists were selected across five categories: At Work, Education, Technology, Urban, and Vulnerable Road Users. The winners will be announced at a ceremony during the Event.  

The Directorate General for Mobility and Transport (DG Move) of the European Commission recently adopted an Implementing Regulation establishing a common set of urban mobility indicators to be applied across the European Union. This Implementing Regulation mandates Member States to collect policy-relevant data on urban mobility, helping cities, Member States and EU institutions to monitor developments on the basis of reliable data. It covers key dimensions of urban mobility, including sustainability, safety and accessibility. This adoption marks an important step in strengthening the evidence base for urban mobility policy in the EU. Better data will support better decisions, enabling public authorities at all levels to plan and invest more effectively in sustainable urban transport. 

The PHOEBE Decision Support Tool (DST) is now available through the PHOEBE Dashboard. Developed within the Horizon Europe PHOEBE project, the platform enables practitioners, researchers and decision-makers to assess and compare the impacts of road safety interventions using evidence from real-world European pilot cases. Users can explore safety, mobility and environmental performance indicators, Impact Modification Factors (IMFs), and supporting statistical evidence to evaluate different intervention scenarios. The dashboard supports transparent, data-driven decision-making towards safer and more sustainable transport systems. 

The United Nations Road Safety Fund (UNRSF), has recently launched the UN Road Safety Lab, a new Knowledge Hub and AI-enabled knowledge platform for road safety. Established in 2018, UNRSF brings together 21 UN member organizations, governments, the World Bank, the private sector and civil society under a single coordinated framework, mobilizing resources and driving system-level road safety reforms in low- and middle-income countries. The new Lab is hosted by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), the training and capacity-development arm of the UN, and organizes its content across four core areas: Knowledge Products, Platforms of Engagement, Learning, and AI-Enabled Knowledge Solutions, alongside an interactive map showcasing the countries where the Fund is active. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released new road death data, showcasing that despite the addition of more than one billion motor-vehicles to the world’s roads, road traffic deaths declined by 21% between 2011 and 2025. With nearly 60% of the world’s population now living in urban areas, growing demand for mobility threatens to overwhelm transport systems that were largely designed around private motor vehicles. This data show that half of all countries reported falling fatalities in that period. Yet progress is uneven, with 36% drop in deaths in the WHO European Region, a 15% drop in the Western Pacific Region, a 2% drop in the WHO South-East Asian Region, no change in rates in the Americas and a 17% rise in deaths in the WHO African Region. 

The European Road Safety Charter of the European Commission recently published an article titled “Road infrastructure: A foundation for safer roads“, highlighting the critical role of road infrastructure in achieving safer roads. To create self-explaining and forgiving roads, six core design principles guide safer infrastructure: (a) provide orientation by making the road environment easy to read and anticipate; (b) attract attention through clear design and signs highlighting hazards; (c) promote standardization with consistent layouts that help users recognize situations; (d) support the detection of potential conflicts through good visibility and guidance at critical points; (e) improve clarity with visible and easy to interpret signs and markings and (f) provide passive safety through forgiving roadsides and designs that reduce injury severity. 

A Paper titled “Traffic safety culture within the safe system: developing a common definition of traffic safety culture” authored by Tor-Olav Nævestad, Uta Meesmann, Henriette Wallén Warner, Susanne Kaiser, Ingeborg S. Hesjevoll, Vibeke Milch, Sonja Forward, Mathias De Roeck, Michael Schachner, Dimitris Nikolaou, Gunilla Björklund, Alexandra Laiou, Hanna Wennberg, Eva Aigner-Breuss and Anita Eichhorn was recently published in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities. This study developed the following definition of traffic safety culture, based on a three-step refinement approach, combining literature reviews, Delphi studies and focus group discussions: “Traffic safety culture encompasses shared values, beliefs, attitudes, norms, and patterns of behaviours that shape how traffic safety is understood and enacted within a meaningfully defined group of actors in the transport system. This meaningfully defined group of actors can refer to road users, organizations, authorities, or other actors within the transport system.” 

The Horizon Europe PHOEBE (Predictive Approaches for Safer Urban Environment) Project organized with great success its online Final Webinar on 30 June 2026. This 90-minute online event showcased the PHOEBE framework from inception to implementation, together with the various integration steps taken within the project. The outcomes of the PHOEBE pilots, covering mode choice and behavioural modelling, iRAP and AIMSUN models were presented, and related policy recommendations were discussed.  NTUA actively contributed with the following presentation:

•  Phoebe Project: Overview, Use cases & methodology

The Horizon Europe PHOEBE (Predictive Approaches for Safer Urban Environment) Project organized with great success and high attendance its Final Event as a dedicated Workshop within the 10th Road Safety and Simulation International Conference (RSS2026), held in Naples, Italy, on 23 June 2026. The event showcased the project’s innovative framework for forecasting and improving urban road safety through the integration of advanced road safety assessment, microsimulation, behavioural modelling, socioeconomic analysis, driver telematics, and artificial intelligence. Bringing together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and industry representatives, the workshop highlighted the project’s key scientific achievements, demonstrated integrated safety prediction tools for vulnerable road users and active mobility, and explored evidence-based recommendations for safer, smarter, and more sustainable urban transport.   NTUA actively contributed with the following presentations:

•  Phoebe Project: Athens Use Case
•  Phoebe Project: Overview, Use cases & methodology

The World Road Association (PIARC) together with the Polish Road Congress Association and the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways (GDDKiA), organized with great success the 3rd PIARC International Conference on Road Tunnel Operations and Safety, which was held in Krakow, Poland, on 30 September-2 October 2026. The Event focused on the planning, design and construction of road tunnels, with particular emphasis on safety, operation and maintenance, presenting best practices and experiences from international and Polish Projects. This third edition of the Conference brought together tunnel operators, designers, firefighters, researchers and representatives of road administrations from around the world.

The World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTRS) organized with great success the 17th World Conference on Transport Research which was held in Toulouse, France, on 6-10 July 2026. For the last 40 years, WCTR has been organized every three years by the WCTR Society, uniting specialists from the transportation sector worldwide. Topics for discussion at the World Conference on Transport Research were grouped into 9 distinct themes which include maritime and air transport logistics, infrastructure design, traffic management in urban environments or the emergence of transport in developing countries.  

The NTUA actively contributed by presenting 9 papers and a key note speech:

• •  Artificial Intelligence and Road Safety
  •  Enhancing Risky Driving Behavior Classification Using Conditional GANs (cGANs): A Data Augmentation Approach
  •  Identifying Dangerous Driving Behaviour through Big Data and Machine Learning Techniques
  • Analysis of the Acceptability and Cost Benefits of Reducing the Speed Limit to 80 km/h on the Intercity Road Network in Greece
  • Weak supervision and fine-tuning with contrastive learning for multiclass lane marking segmentation
  • A Time-Window GNN-Based Network Partition for Identifying High- and Low-Risk Nodes in Road Networks
  • Advances in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Automated Driving technologies within the European Context
  • Exploring Public Perceptions of city-wide 30 km/h Speed Limits in Greece: A Survey-Based Study
  • Influence of Vehicle Characteristics on Driving Events Based a Naturalistic Driving Experiment
  • When the Lights Go Out: Observing Pedestrian and Driver Behavior During a Traffic Signal Failure in Central Athens

 

The European Commission together with 2Zero, ERTRAC and CCAM are organizing the Road Transport Research Results Conference (RTR Conference) which will take place in Brussels, on 23-24 February 2027. This 10th anniversary edition aims to deliver a holistic view of how the European research scene is moving forward, bringing benefits to the environment, economy and European society overall. More than 500 on-site participants will learn about EU-funded and Horizon Europe projects’ results and expected impacts, and what the next research steps are in essential areas for road transport: Green Vehicles, Urban Mobility, Logistics, Intelligent Transport Systems, Safety, Automated Road Transport, Batteries.

ERTICO is organizing the ITS World Congress 2027 which will be held in Birmingham, UK, on 25-29 October 2027, under the theme: “Connect ideas. Transform Transport”. This Event provides a unique platform for governments, industry leaders, researchers, and innovators to collaborate on the development of safer, greener, and more efficient transport systems. The ITS World Congress brings together the international mobility community to exchange ideas, showcase innovation, and accelerate the deployment of intelligent transport solutions worldwide. Programme is available here. Researchers can submit their contributions until 22 January 2027. 

Future Transportation Journal has recently launched the Special Issue titled: “New Challenges in Road Safety Infrastructure Management” aiming to address emerging challenges and propose innovative solutions for enhancing the safety, resilience, and performance of road infrastructure systems. It provides an opportunity to present the latest scientific advances in infrastructure safety assessment, risk analysis, proactive safety management, connected infrastructure, artificial intelligence applications, digital twins, and data-driven decision-support tools for road safety infrastructure management. The manuscript submission deadline is until 28 February 2027. Guest editors of this special issue from NTUA are: Dr. Stergios Mavromatis, Prof. Dr. George Yannis.